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Fallout 4 Level Design

Fallout 4 level design in the Creation Kit. I joined a team building the Floating Institute expansion mid-project and owned its third-floor interiors, then kept the merged build stable and fast. Before that, I was project lead on a smaller build, Ashen Vale, and designed its Hall of Idols puzzle chamber.

The Hall of Idols puzzle chamber: spotlight-guided statues and traversal staging.
My role
Third-floor level designer and merge support on the team level; project lead on my earlier Milestone One build
Team
Joined an active Fallout 4 mod team mid-project
Built with
Fallout 4 Creation Kit, Blender, NifSkope, B.A.E.
Result
A stable merged build with connected, optimised interior spaces
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Hall of Idols puzzle

I narrowed the design to one production-ready module: rotate the idol statues, reveal hidden stairs, and descend into the Sun Chamber. Keeping it standalone also reduced merge conflicts.

Player loop: read the dead end → rotate the idols → unlock the stairs → descend. Built with scripted placeholders, spotlight guidance and a modular handoff to the next area.

Revised top-down layout: idol plinths, interact points, and stair route to the Sun Chamber.
Creation Kit working view showing object lists, scripted placeholders, and lighting pass configuration.
Interactive statue placeholder tuned for rotate-on-activation behavior and readability.

The team level

On the team's Floating Institute level I built room variants for the third floor and stabilised door links, portals, bounds, lighting and merged cells, so the combined build stayed connected and readable.

I used Blender, NifSkope and B.A.E. to understand mesh and collision edits, and built in the Creation Kit with load doors and XMarkerHeading markers for reliable travel between cells. In-engine commands like coc and tgm let me jump between cells to isolate problems.

  • Duplicate FormIDs

    Combining several team cells into one shared file produced duplicate FormID warnings and conflicts that I worked through.

  • Broken colours and stretching

    I traced a major colour and stretch artefact to room-bound and portal conflicts, then rebuilt the setup until it stabilised.

  • Performance

    Dense NPC, light and model setups strained performance. I reduced them while keeping rooms readable and atmospheric.

How I kept it fast

  • No oversized enemy rooms or over-dense encounters where they hurt frame rate most.
  • Teleport and load-door routing keep traversal broad without rendering everything at once.
  • Room bounds and portals so only relevant geometry is processed each frame.
  • Readability first: stable navigation and clear combat spaces over visual excess.
Creation Kit editor view: object placement, door links and room bounds.

Earlier work: Milestone One

My first Creation Kit project, where I was project lead, was deliberately much smaller than the team level. It taught me puzzle spaces, traversal setup, encounter pacing and editor-side debugging before I worked inside the larger merged build.

Milestone One screenshots
Sun Chamber layout diagram: platforms, trap zones, retrieval objective, and collapse trigger after idol is taken.
In-engine composition and encounter-space lighting for the Hall of Idols.
Iteration phase showing traversal-blockout and trigger testing around the statue platforms.
Sun Chamber setup used to stage the major transition beat after puzzle completion.
Early terrain shaping pass for the jungle exterior entrance area (WIP).

Documents

Milestone report excerpts and tutorials I learned from