About usage of xEdit, SCOLS, COBJs, etc. for Contest. Also: About performance expectations

I would like to ask about if we can utilize technical methods/knowledge for enhancement of our city plans while still staying within the no DLCs or external mods besides Sim Settlements and no assets(ie NIFs) rules?

• SCOL(Static Collections): To be totally clear here, I'm not referring towards the typical utilization of SCOLs that we usually do with creating Sim Settlements plots for our Stage Models where we generate a NIF then set that up as a Static. Rather I'm referring towards direct utilization of the SCOL record itself, an array of Statics with their positional data and scale. A further benefit is that by referencing simply a SCOL record that itself is an array of others, the City Plan can reduce the script burden compared to referencing hundreds of static records. I am hopeful this method could help to keep the burden away from the terrible 64mb Script Limit. It's a big deal for me as unless I minimize this as much as possibly I may not actually use my City Plans.

What if only several SCOL records were referenced, covering >90% of the City Plan? Like it's a giant plot? I am thinking I would follow a procedure similar to the plot. Main "shell" SCOL for the structure that is in common between all levels, second SCOL for additions of Level 1 over the Foundation Level, third for L2, 4th for L3. I simply use the ground & Navmesh blocks from PBP for navigation. For decorations I prototype in game then measure positional differences and set that up as a SCOL too. I already generally build in a way that tracking this is fairly easy to do, by aligning angles appropriately. Much like plots the only things to be left out are Lights, Movable Statics, Furniture, etc. The City Plan's list would contain maybe a dozen SCOLs, then Furniture/Lights/Activators/Markers/etc. I'd estimate 30-50 records to be tracked for the City Plan vs probably over 1000 from most of the entered City Plans I've seen or from any from Rise of the Commonwealth.

• COBJ(Constructible Objects): It is possible to make use of wider variety of vanilla statics by spawning the objects then linking via console command. A possible easier way would be making COBJs to build them more quickly, though I'm already fairly accustomed to the spawn then link method. I believe that the COBJ itself may not be needed by users so long as they already had the required static & textures? As isn't this how Project Blueprint works? PBP itself contains COBJs for the additions but they exist in either vanilla or Sim Settlements Main.BA2. I'm not 100% sure on this one though, IDK if the COBJ itself is explicitly needed.
• xEdit: Other tricks via CK/xEdit would be for instance placing Occlusion Planes which can't be done at runtime in the game. A holding cell could be made & the planes moved in if City Plan is in use. What I would do with xEdit is prototype via the Creation Kit then use xEdit to merge needed data into my City Plan's plugin. We could run the data reduction scripts too, to reduce the footprint on the 64mb limit?

If I enter again I'd like to try to set my standard a bit higher. SCOL & Occlusion Plane would optimize things effectively so I can then add more without any performance loss. On that topic I do also wonder about the performance expectations. I have a high end system so it is hard to tell how things will go for the Xbox, feels like largely guess work. I stayed on safe side earlier but TBH doing so was very limiting.

I ended up answering this for XV on Discord, but just so everyone else knows - this would technically work, but it's not something we're supporting for the contest as it would add a lot of complexity to the merge process which already takes a fair amount of time.