Helgen cavein not triggering.

[snipers69]

Doing a fresh modded playthrough of skyrim and going through helgen. upon reaching the drawbridge after the last area with imperials/stormcloaks a cave in is supposed to trigger, keeping the player from backtracking. the event does not occure with the passage just being blocked off and ralof/hadvar is prevented from advancing. I theorise it may be because of errors with alternate start uninstalation. is there another way to trigger it or how can i fix this bug?

[wfandrews]

If that is the area I am thinking of you must precede Hadvar/Rolaf across the bridge otherwise the scene will not play out. If you have gone across before them and they did not follow you then it is a bug that certainly could be caused by uninstalling a mod.

 

I strongly advise you to play through the opening sequence with no mods enabled, except USLEEP, and save after you exit the cave; then enable your mods, run LOOT, and Wrye Bash and set up your game the way you are going to play it. If you do this with a vanilla game you can make three or four saves and rename them and keep them in a folder so you will always have a clean save to start a new game with. Of course this is assuming you are not using an alternate start mod.

 

When I am starting a new game with mods that I have not used before I use one of these clean saves and load four or five mods at a time, play through to the "that's Bleak Falls Barrow" scene, exit and load four or five more mods and do it again. It is a pretty tedious process if you have 150 or so mods but saves you time in the long run if you set up your game with those mods and start the game and then the game crashes because of a mod conflict and you have no idea which mod or mods are causing the conflict. Four or five mods are easier to check than 150 or so.

 

The tools we use to set up our games, LOOT, TES5Edit, Wrye Bash, a mod manager, are invaluable but not infallible, sometimes playing the game is the only way you will find a mod conflict.