Plus, a lot of the foundation is already in place to give you a good platform to start with. Personally, I enjoy making "rebuild" mods because it takes what was basically useless space in the game and turns it into something usable. I also thought about adding some street vendors in other cities that the player could track down and ask if they wanted to move to Helgen. They would have to go around and hire their own guards and possibly recruit merchants to set up shop. or, the player could also choose an independent path for the city and tell both factions they don't want or need either of them. I'd like to tie everything back into the civil war quests so that depending on what side the player chooses they could get support from that faction. If that's possible, it should be fairly straightforward to build the quests and work it all in together. Hopefully, it's possible to simply switch those markers with a script and reverse what was enabled or disabled and add in the new stuff. I believe the final burned out houses get enabled sometime during the opening and the finished houses get disabled at that same point I assume. The one big thing though is that there are so many scripted events happening in the opening of the game you would have to be extremely careful in how you edit the exterior worldspace. (Most of my mods are "rebuild" mods, so I've got some experience with this sort of thing.) It has a LOT of possibilities, and a good keep already there. I've already been scouting around the burned out ruins and keep with this in mind. If I knew anything about modding id do it myself but since Im not I guess this is a request. Then you getting a small house in the town.
Maybe something with the Stormcloaks taking over the rebuilt keep and another quest bringing back some of the survivors. Similar to the rebuilt kvatch mods from Oblivion.
#Skyrim rebuild helgen mod mod
One the CS comes out I think a great idea for a mod would be a rebuilt Helgen mod with quests to lead to it being rebuilt and then after as it is a fully functional settlement.