"I couldn't find anything so I ran the game again and it no longer crashes, for some reason"

[anjenthedog]

So I saw this offered in a post in another site's tech support forum today, a sidelong comment I see quite often from those posting about something causing this or that ctd after they've added a new custom follower or other new mod, and then automagically fixes itself after a few failed attempts to play, both there and here and elsewhere. I've even said it myself in the past.

 

In fact, I see this "solution" often enough in forum posts that I'm beginning to see a pattern. New mod add, game crashes shortly after. Game suddenly works again without any real intervention. Magic!

For me, the symptom occurs on startup after installing a new mod. The game will often flicker during load, then ctd on first attempt to start, or give me a blackscreen freeze (game is running, I can hear, but can't see).

So, being a stubborn person, I kill the stalled instance of skyrim, then I fire up the game again, choose the same save for loading, and it gets most of the way loaded, all seems well... but then it crashes just as its finalizing the UI. Well MF@%#&&!*!@~~~!!!!

One more try (sometimes two more tries) and voila, all is well.

Were I not to try that second (and third) boot, I'd think the game was broken, even though it's just some transient effect. And then I'd uninstall the new mod and never look back. (and tbh, I wonder how many times I just uninstalled and dumped mods because of this multi-boot issue before I stumbled onto it...or tht is, I wonder how many were actually "bad mods" and how many were just exhibiting this symptomology)

Ok, so now the meat of my off-the-wall babblefest...That of the mechanism behind this "apparent" failure that isn't a failure... So... what I'm wondering is whether we're rushing the game somehow after installing new mods, or at least for some of them. That in these cases, the game just isn't able to do all of its mod-post-install housekeeping (adding MCM content, or maybe modifying some variables, or whatever, idk) "fast enough" to finish up before the game wants/needs to use it, and then it dies. But since it's already done part of the reconfiguring (my idle speculation on what it's doing), the next one continues the process beyond the last failure point, and then in the next all is ready for a normal boot. Doesn't quite make sense (unless perhaps the game is writing configure info to hardcode during load) , but nonetheless that's how it feels due to the repeatedly repeated need for two or three boots before the game works.

Not suggesting that every new mod I install behaves like this, (many just install and work) but many do (I'd observe that in the last 100 mods I installed I've seen this in at least 25) so you might keep this in mind when booting up that new mod you just installed, if the game immediately chokes on first boot following installation. Give it another try before phreaking out. If it gets a little farther before choking, give it another try. It *might take more than one boot to "seat" it.

Discuss?