It's here at last - the Skyrim Creation Kit, hi-res textures, and more, and it's a pretty awesome bundle.
After months of fingernail-biting anticipation, the Skyrim Creation Kit from Bethesda is free of its bonds. And this ain't your grandpappy's construction kit - for the first time, the CK is now able to directly publish user-generated mods utilising Steam's Workshop platform.
This also means, for those who have so far stayed clear of mods due to fear of fscking something up, that you can install mods from Workshop with a single click and know that it will 'just work'. Or at least, that's the plan - you tell us when you dive into it after reading this page if you haven't already.
So what's the Creation Kit like? We've had an inside man (okay, me) testing the CK as part of a select beta group (and bound by an NDA, on pain of death at a mysterious fort called Helgen) for a number of weeks now and are happy confirm it's all we expected and more.
Past construction kits for Bethesda games have always been powerful tools of content creation - you only have to look at the 35,000 mods for Oblivion and Fallout 3 to get an idea of this - but the Creation Kit is quite a step up from previous versions.
New to this release are the Scene Editor to visually organise interactions with NPCs, real-time lighting and shadowing in the preview editor, Dialog Views for mapping NPC conversations, and an entirely new scripting language called Papyrus. The latter is perhaps the most impressive, providing for a threaded event-driven system of script execution using a language similar to Python. A swathe of new scripting commands are also present, allowing for mods that weren't possible before. Script editing and compiling can now be done external to the CK as well, and if you plan to spend any time playing with it we recommend using an external editor such as Notepad++ or Sublime, which just happen to have pages on the CK Wiki to help you configure them with Papyrus definitions (see Notepad++ Papyrus Setup and Sublime Papyrus Setup respectively.)
Even if you're new to Bethesda's modding tools, just playing around with the Creation Kit will give you immense insight into how Skyrim was made, so don't be afraid to give it a spin. You can install and launch the CK from the 'Tools' section of Steam.
As if the CK and the launch of Steam Workshop for Skyrim wasn't enough, Bethesda has blessed PC owners of Skyrim with a High-Resolution texture pack that roughly doubles the detail of most textures in the game. Downloading this 3.1GB bundle of joy is a no-brainer - in Steam simply click on your Skyrim entry in your library, then click DLC on the right hand side to grab it. But does this mean third-party texture packs by modders are no longer needed? Not quite - while extensive, the pack doesn't cover everything. See Brumbek's excellent breakdown of the new texture pack here.
Finally, to celebrate the launch of the Workshop for Skyrim, Bethesda and Valve teamed up to bring you a tie-in of vast proportions. As vast as the emptiness of space, even - Fall of the Space Core sees Portal 2's Space Core enter Skyrim as a slightly-less-than-lore-correct companion for you. Rumour has it however that you can craft him into a helmet, which somehow seems fitting (see what I did there? Ah geez...)
You can also find a mod by yours truly made using the CK during the beta test - Mart's Savegame De-Bloatifier will help remove clutter and cruft from your game. If you like it, rate it!
Issue: 137 | June, 2012