WinterishClover

The breakup of Highreach Castle

Added 2025-05-20 14:05:26 +0000 UTC

I wanted to share a little bit of progress and my thought processes on how I'm going to handle Highreach Castle's girth increase in V2. As you know, we'll be adding a plethora (Hefe, would you say I have a plethora?) of new NPCs for the various add on roles that will both be for the Council AND some immersion (cooks, janitors, jesters(?), etc...) plus I want to turn the Castle into a Heartfire's compatible, move your family in type place. So there's obviously a lack of those rooms currently. Secondly, I've always hated the King's bedroom. It's meh as heck. Thirdly, I've always hated how Nobles and Councilors currently don't have any privacy as they all just sleep in a big hostel. So how do I add rooms for each new role, a kitchen, a staff quarters, bedrooms for each role and noble, kids room, a new royal quarters and whatever else I find I need along the way WITHOUT rebuilding from scratch and/or loosing the parts of the castle I do like? Well see the screenshot. I've exploded Highreach Castle into individual segments and rooms. Now what I can do is building/bring in new segments and connect them in a logical floor plan (while trying to maintain the structure of the exterior of Highreach (without overdoing it) - reconnect the rooms I want to keep and the clutter I want to keep) and then rebuild.

What about performance? Well I'm researching how effective the built-in optimization techniques are in 2025 (Portal Rooms and Occlusion Planes) but I think we're going to have to make Highreach Castle multi-level as well. You don't really need to load the servants quarters everytime you want to sit on the throne, so they'll probably have their own cell. Maybe I'll put the kitchen and new bedrooms on the same floor too. Maybe the new Royal Quarters will be it's own cell? Things like that.

I am, as usual, always open to ideas and suggestions on the layout as well. This will probably be the last big visual aspect of V2 to do. The rest will be the nuts and bolts, so I'm excited to do this last fun part before overhauling the Economy of Skyrim...