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Historical cleanup ledger

Specific data cleanups, removals, rejected historical behavior, and provenance behind the Definitive transformation.

Historical cleanup ledger

This page is the durable archaeology record: what was changed or removed, why, and whether the action applies to canonical source, staged vanilla inputs, or final masterless serialization.

It is intentionally more detailed than the project landing page.

Historical build lineage

The modern builder descends from Starwind-Builder and TSI deployment work, but Definitive is not the old TSI build.

Historical CI had separate SP/TSI behavior. The TSI path was explicitly allowed to alter or remove content for server operation, including using a no-main- quest Patch variant and performing reference surgery that a definitive single-player base must never inherit.

The modern builder therefore preserves historical scripts as provenance but re-approves operations individually.

Source dialogue exact-copy cleanup

A parent-aware RemasteredPatch audit identified 3,002 INFO records that were byte-for-byte identical to the inherited parent record, including linkage.

These records contributed no semantic or structural change and were removed from canonical Starwind source.

This cleanup alone reduced enormous TESCS dialogue snapshots such as Hello without changing effective dialogue.

Many physical Starwind INFOs were semantically identical to Bethesda parent INFOs but carried modified prev_id/next_id links because TESCS rewrote neighboring records when new dialogue was inserted.

These were not globally deleted on sight. Link-only overrides can be the mechanical glue surrounding a legitimate new Starwind INFO.

Later actor-provenance analysis identified a subset that served only to import vanilla actors and dependency trees. Those proven dirty roots were removed at source, allowing their actor/script/inventory trees to disappear through normal closure rather than final-plugin whack-a-mole.

Dead Tribunal TR08_Hlaalu INFOs

Three V1.15 INFO IDs were modified Starwind copies of Tribunal dialogue gated on unreachable Tribunal journal state:

19191290671947220251
192701535310983235
3221696071812632454

They were removed from Starwind source.

A fourth Helseth Hello INFO requiring TR08_Hlaalu >= 100 had already been removed by the exact-copy cleanup.

Vanilla faction-dialogue staged prune

The final exact set of 53 inherited Bethesda INFO IDs responsible for dead Morag Tong / Hands of Almalexia / Census and Excise dependencies is embedded in the build driver.

They are deleted only from temporary staged vanilla masters before dialogue materialization.

A preliminary broad tes3cmd --sub-match search returned 563 IDs and was explicitly rejected as overbroad.

FFFF sentinel

Two apparent missing faction references were actually speaker_faction = "FFFF", the TES3 Construction Set representation of -NO FACTION-.

The closure model was corrected; no fake faction record is imported.

Response-text dialogue materialization removed

Generic topic-name scanning was progressively narrowed and finally removed. Ordinary response text is not considered sufficient evidence to import a Bethesda DIAL.

The final test case was price on your head. Manual inspection proved the six candidate INFOs were Morrowind Thieves Guild bounty-removal content, not generic crime-system functionality needed by Starwind.

INFO tombstone serialization removed

An earlier masterless build contained exactly 4,826 more physical INFOs than the expected live set. Every excess record was a deletion tombstone.

The decoupler was corrected so tombstones suppress their parent during reconstruction but are not serialized after the masters are gone.

This change brought effective order, physical order, and serialized links to exact equality.

Non-dialogue tombstones

The same masterless principle was later generalized to other deleted records: once parent/master deletion semantics have been applied, dead top-level tombstones are not useful in the final self-contained artifact.

Exact duplicate MGEFs

Eight byte-identical physical MagicEffect duplicates were identified in one intermediate build (Levitate, SlowFall, Lock, Invisibility, Dispel, Telekinesis, Mark, Reflect) and deduplicated.

This is not MGEF pruning. MGEF/SKIL/GMST remain foundational and off-limits to reachability-based minimization.

Region sleep-creature cleanup

Reused vanilla regions carried vanilla sleep_creature leveled-list links into Starwind pseudo-exterior areas. Those links could import Morrowind/Bloodmoon sleep encounter lists and vanilla creatures into Star Wars locations.

The causal region sleep dependencies were removed rather than pruning the creatures after import.

Exterior/LAND/LTEX residue

An earlier Standalone corpus retained a tiny leftover exterior worldspace island after the large exterior-cell cleanup. That residue was separately audited and removed where it was proven unnecessary.

Definitive revalidates the full approved corpus after Naboo/Enhanced/etc.; the historical result is recorded here as provenance, not as a blanket rule that all future LAND/LTEX records must be deleted.

Dialogue-driven late actor cleanup

A pre-Definitive provenance pass found 94 actors imported only after dialogue liveness. 82 were rooted solely in link-only TESCS-dirt INFOs. Cleaning those causal INFOs removed the actor records and their transitive inventory/script/etc. dependencies naturally.

This is why the modern decoupler also defers dialogue dependencies until after the non-dialogue actor population is known.

Naboo DRM/test cleanup

Naboo is approved Definitive content, but old DRM/test machinery is not. Those records are removed as integration/source hygiene, with closure validation used to ensure no live container/object still references a deleted dependency.

Bing/Enhanced integration cleanup

Reviewed dirty-cell, orphan-bodypart, duplicate-reference, and related merge fixes discovered during TSI maintenance remain valid when they correct the source data itself rather than implement server policy.

The final actor-provenance pass also removed 23 source-owned INFO records that imported vanilla actors only through dialogue dependency closure. The records were limited to the approved Starwind source packs:

  • Bing's Race Pack: 946685598144191231, 2301111508799109825, 909260325349167310, 864550852431976539, 1906888690290850855, 859512568224451931, 4773219712502012140, 883924055226252767, 129241610110205027, 2734162771419514016, 135879349263212923, 3260216811858410234, 17567110311180430349;
  • Enhanced: 3109648071102316693, 2257190978769676981;
  • Naboo: 283975135048201436;
  • StarwindPlanExp: 1847857661117273120, 1910916768339372042, 2230768852655184036, 1416449617362841427, 619028186535386174, 1294752263377418595, 1328358151231324457.

Six of the Bing records were the same editor-navigation marker across the Intruder, Hello, Thief, Idle, Flee, and Hit topics. Each used dialog placeholder as speaker and -----TSAESCI VOICEFILES START HERE----- as text. They were editor markers, not runtime dialogue. Provenance telemetry was used to identify the records; no broad PROBABLE_TESCS_LINK_DIRT deletion was performed.

After the actor-bootstrap class was solved, a controlled source-hygiene batch removed the 43 remaining records that survived into the Definitive output: 42 link-only overrides and Naboo's one redundant exact copy (airan's teeth, INFO 100711405879315001). The batch was grouped by source: V1.15 (8), RemasteredPatch (24), Bing's Race Pack (4), Enhanced (1), PlanExp (4), and Naboo (2). The strict rebuild preserved all 591 canonical DIALs and INFOs, all ordering and link invariants, and reduced the final output by only the records that were not recoverable as effective dialogue.

Two V1.15 Attack link-only findings were intentionally excluded because RemasteredPatch deletes them later. The remaining 10 orphan-delete tombstones are still source merge semantics and are not part of this cleanup batch.

Alt Start escape-pod background selection

The historical TSI pipeline deleted the entire Alt Start Imperial Prison Ship cell under the assumption that it was a conflicting duplicate. That was too broad for Definitive: StarwindMPRecords is excluded, while Alt Start carries the source-owned background-selection additions needed by the supported single-player build.

The restored contribution includes the SW_CharGenPodDoor2, SW_CharGenPodDoor3, SW_CharGenPodDoor4, SW_CharGenPodDoor5, SW_CharGenPodDoor7, SW_CharGenPodDoorMando, and SW_CharGenPodDoorShipCap placements, plus the live SW_CharGenPodAct escape-pod activator placement. The corresponding door/activator definitions and scripts are retained as well. The Definitive merge now preserves these Alt Start additions instead of deleting the whole cell.

Dead non-playable class cleanup

The Definitive pair initially contained 99 CLAS records. Manual reference auditing identified 25 non-playable classes with zero NPC, dialogue, and script references:

Apothecary       Assassin Service    Bard              Battlemage Service
Bookseller       Clothier            Dreamers          Enchanter Service
Gardener         Gondolier           Guild Guide       Journalist
Mabrigash        Miner               Necromancer       Pawnbroker
Pilgrim          Priest Service      Publican          Shipmaster
Sorcerer Service Warlock             Wise Woman        Wise Woman Service
Witch

They are deleted only from staged Morrowind.esm, Tribunal.esm, Bloodmoon.esm, and StarwindRemasteredV1.15.esm inputs before the canonical merge. The source JSON masters remain unchanged, and the 18 playable Starwind classes plus 56 referenced non-playable classes are retained. The result is 74 intentional/referenced classes in the Definitive pair.

Czerka faction reaction cleanup

The V1.15 Imperial Legion override is intentionally repurposed as Czerka Corporation, with Czerka rank names and Starwind membership. Its inherited Imperial Legion reaction table was stale Morrowind diplomacy, so the override now retains only its self-reaction. This is a faction-record correction, not part of the class cleanup.

Main-quest removals deliberately not carried forward

Old TSI deployment included or contemplated destructive operations that do not belong in Definitive Edition. The modern builder does not perform:

  • no-main-quest Patch substitution;
  • SW_ShipQuester removal;
  • old Taris/main-quest instance deletions;
  • old server-only Shade/Thegg cleanup;
  • MP replacement-door/freighter edits;
  • Courte server cleanup merely for multiplayer behavior;
  • TSI gold/Kolto replacement policy;
  • MPRecords merge;
  • Vvardenfell merge/surgery.

The main-quest preservation guard exists specifically to prevent accidental regression toward those historical server transforms.

Enchantment capacity 375 retained intentionally

The old TSI pipeline also normalized otherwise-unenchanted equipment to capacity 375. Unlike the destructive MP operations above, this one was reviewed and explicitly retained as Definitive design.

The reason is player customization: long-term server experience indicated that players valued freedom to use the equipment they liked rather than having Morrowind's original enchantment capacity dictate appearance/build choices.

Provenance principle

Historical TSI behavior falls into three buckets:

  1. source/data fix — may be retained after review;
  2. intentional Definitive design — may be retained and documented as policy;
  3. multiplayer deployment policy — must not enter Definitive merely because it once existed in build.sh.

This classification is more important than whether a line appeared under an old tsi branch.

API index · Source corpus & preprocessing · Dialogue canonicalization