Help! Skyrim crashing about every 2 hours or so

[Shadeybladey]

:D

[Gorgopis]

In our opinions, This kind of crash usually results because Skyrim adds (gathers) more and more object and quest and cell references to each game save, during a prolonged session. There's no real need, though, for each new save to keep earlier cell references from cells (in-game-locations) your characters aren't in anymore.

 

We found online advice that you can extend your gameplay by adding a couple of annoying actions to your save-process. You may wish to try these below if you're still having issues. It's very likely not your mods causing the crash, unless they have texture or script conflicts, which your mod-organizer should sort out.

 

1). First, make sure you don't have some background process, if you're on PC, that times to "act up" every two hours or so, like a virus-checker or firewall or program-updater. These timed processes can "hiccup" SR. Online tuts can help you optimize the timing of your PC's application-timed-processes.

 

2). While you're playing, after an hour or so, make a save, and then in-game use the console to keyboard "pcb" without the quotes, to purge the cell-buffers (pcb). After you do this, you'll see, in console, the list of unnecessary cell and object references being purged: very interesting.

 

3). We have a theory that SKSE, as useful as it is, may corrupt saves. Formerly, we were going into our save folders after each session and deleting the SKSE saves and keeping just the ESS ones. The SKSE saves are metadata and much smaller in size, and we're guessing they are referencing that unneeded cell-reference data embedded in the save, and then keeping it linked to their correlated ESS saves. Every time you save, SKES writes a metadata file, and places it next to its ESS save, both with the same times and dates. So, after each play-session, you can visit the save folders and see the new SKSE data added.

 

4). If you play SR online at STEAM, then this next advice does not apply. But if you're playing offline, as we do, you may also try revalidating your files at STEAM, by following online tuts on how to do that. Once you log into STEAM, revalidate your SR files, play online for five to ten minutes or so and make a new save; then take STEAM offline again. This step has stabilized our saves, and we're not having any crashes.

 

5). Finally, here follows a bit of extra bother that has kept our SR stable. We never quick-save. We never overwrite a save. We always make a new hard save. Periodically we exit the game to purge saves (and SKSE metadata) from our save folder that we don't need anymore, every three days or so, and we keep only the saves that are crucial junctions in quests, or that we want to experiment with or to replay fun dungeons and events.

 

GL