Cleaning the vanilla .esm files; the importance thereof.

[UnmeiX]

Alright! So first off, this isn't a thread questioning "should I clean them" or asking "how do I clean them", this is a thread about WHY. Why do I feel the why is necessary? Because it fixes things you didn't know it could fix. To elaborate..

 

I started a new game with an Altmer mage, and everything went great. I reached level 4 and got my hands on my first bow, and a few steel arrows. Now, having Dynamic Things installed, I thought it'd be a good idea to train against the training dummies and archery targets in Solitude, near my starting point of the Thalmor Embassy. Also, having Requiem installed, my archery was only level 5, so I definitely felt some practice was in order.

 

Once I started firing the bow, I noticed the strangest bug ever.

 

Every time I nocked an arrow and fired it.. The next nocked arrow -increased- my arrow count by one.

 

Yes. Every time I let an arrow fly and strung another, I'd magically gain another arrow of the same type. Moreover, it'd only happen -if- I fired the last arrow. If I sheathed the bow to hold the arrow, nocking the same arrow wouldn't give me another.

 

At first this doesn't sound so bad; but I'm a hardcore sort of Skyrim player, and infinite arrows didn't seem fun to me. Worse still, not only could I still pull them from the targets (thus duplicating the arrows) but if I missed the target, I picked up two arrows for every one on the ground.

 

What?

 

The answer to my woes turned out to be dirty .esms. I'd backed up my old ones when I reinstalled Skyrim, to save myself the trouble of cleaning them again, and forgot to replace them. Since that time, I'd already deleted them, but after cleaning them again, the bug vanished entirely.

 

So this post is just informational and to stress the importance of clean .esm files. Using dirty .esms can cause you to encounter all sorts of bugs; even some you didn't know could happen at all. XD

Edited May 4, 2014 by UnmeiX

[UnmeiX]

I'm not sure if this really is part of the same issue, but I think it may be. I'm about to start a new game to test it, but.. The issue at hand and why it's bumpworthy.

 

After reloading my game with the clean .esms, I no longer had issues with duplicating arrows. Everything seemed to have returned to normal... Until I tried to talk to Angeline in Solitude (the alchemist).

 

She speaks her normal lines if I walk near her, but I cannot interact with her any longer.. There is the prompt to talk, but no dialogue, and pressing it doesn't even cause her to speak her normal lines, as other NPCs do when they have no dialogue for you.

 

I'm unsure if this is related to the .esms, but the only things that change her that I use are Requiem, Bring Out Your Dead and Consistent Older People, which I made a little merged patch of my own for. Worked fine, but this dialogue issue is new. I'll see if starting a new game yields different results.