TennesseeTuxedo

Highly recommended! Updating mods after a Startfield update requires a little more effort with Mod Organizer 2 however there is NO thrashing of your hard disk, no constant copying and deleting of files madness. You can install a mod or an update literally in seconds. It's sad to see the users being blamed for the sudden appearance of this, telling people it's there fault for something that has never been mentioned or warned about while installing mods. The expectation that users should have proactively searched all these threads to know what a "bad mod setup" is, is a bad expectation. How would they even know to do that? Why wouldn't Vortex popup and say "you sure you want to do this "bad mod setup"?

Did my final 10 minutes of Vortex purging last night, this time intentional by pressing the "Purge Mods" button in preparation for my move to MO2 which was much quicker than I thought it would be since you can just use the Vortex folders with your downloads and mods already in them. Thank you @AugustaCalidia and @showler for the links for that. It only took a couple hours and I am FREE! I already miss the tighter integration with Nexus but when I downloaded and installed a mod in MO2 in seconds vs 12 minutes+ with Vortex (10 min purge scourge +2 min deploy time), that made up for all, it was so satisfying I was practically giddy. I had a wonderful experience with Vortex and FO4 (although I understand this purge scourge may have metastasized to other games managed with Vortex), which is why I was so bullish with it for Starfield. But Starfield Vortex experience has been miserable and I have lost many gaming hours wrestling with these various issues that seem to be getting worse. This last problem of tacking 10 minutes of purging onto already bloated processes was the 3 ton brick that broke the camel's already sprained back. But I am in a better place thanks to the community here. Peace and enjoy Starfield all!

My workaround to the 10 minutes of purge scourge. This is risky and it would be great if someone could say for certain if this is bad and specifically why, even if done according to instruction here. But it's desperate times waiting 10+ minutes for every mod. Do mod operation (install, enable, disable, uninstall, ...) When the purge scourge starts, exit Vortex. Logs say it closes clean but game folder is now in an inconsistent state, with many or all mods deleted depending on how fast Vortex was killed Re-open Vortex Click Deploy Mods BE VERY CAREFUL! In this part, Vortex can delete every mod you have if you don't click "Revert all changes". Vortex will see the lack of files in the game folder and think that mods were updated outside Vortex to ... have no files in them believe it or not and ask if you want to save this change. Doing so will delete all the files for that mod from your MOD FOLDER! Don't do that or you will be re-downloading all your mods. Instead click "Revert all changes" which tells Vortex you want the files in your mod folders, and want them copied to the game folder. 6. This is what you want to see "Revert change(restore file)". Click Confirm. Done, no purge scourge and your changes are deployed.

All of my conflicts were being handled by Vortex but I disabled all conflicting mods anyway. I have no conflicts but the 10 minutes of purge scourge is still there. I then turned off the Mod Dependency Manager extension and NO PURGE!!!!! So it appears to be a problem of the Mod Dependency Manager. It does not seem to be related to conflicts. How do we find out more about Mod Dependency Manager and what that does to be able to make some more tests to see what can be triggering it to fail like it is? Does it deal with mods that override others? It doesn't seem like it would because that would be plugins.txt that I manage myself. I have not allowed Vortex to manage my plugins.txt at this point in case that is another clue.

Hitting a record. Whatever the problem is, it worsens over time. I have not added any mods just enable and disable a small one esm mod several times over the past day for my testing of the issue. The purge duration seems to steadily increase. On a fresh restart of Vortex so it is not some cumulative effect and my PC's 64Gb is not running out. 10 minutes of purging to disable a one .esm mod. Vortex/Starfield mod folder is 14Gb, ~12k files on NVMe. 2024-06-05T20:52:58.068Z [INFO] [mod-dependency-manager] finished purge activity in 597.709 seconds = 10 minutes!!

There was a message on this forum I think from @Pickysaurus saying we need to uninstall these extensions. It seemed to imply that the problem could be in those. Obviously it would not be all of them, probably just one. I uninstalled everything recognizable, like for games I don't have, and that didn't do anything to help. My next step is to remove all conflicts that Vortex has fixed in rules. There seems to be an implication that conflicts cause this behavior, even if Vortex is supposedly handling them.

I appreciate the link that is helpful. I honestly don't think this will be resolved by the Vortex crew. Its been 5 weeks since first reported with no progress, and there is a chorus of people on here whose job, voluntary or otherwise it is to try to position these problems as the users fault, or that because only a dozen or so reported it on here, that is the only people with the problem and so it's not much concern, which is a bad assumption. If you read the threads on Nexus, REDDIT or anywhere Vortex is well recognized as problematic with Starfield. It's not helpful to the effort to not recognize and try to rectify that. Yesterday I was watching a video of one of the top modders of Starfield showing his wares and he was telling people don't trust or use Vortex, that it has messed up his game "in a myriad of ways". I had more faith until I got to this forum. One thing that would help us solve it ourselves, we need to see more detail in the logs to show what Vortex is doing. Like I don't believe it takes 8 minutes to purge what it is supposedly purging (that is shouldn't be), it's taking some long circuitous route that has one single summary debug message associated with it. It would give a lot of clues to see more detail of that. Is there a verbose option that might give us more detail? I'm a programmer, modder, and problem solver, if it's open source, I don't have a problem editing and compiling a copy, filling it will debug statements to track it down.

On the topic of extensions, another area where it seems like we users are being blamed for having this problem. Other than maybe Starfield and Harry Potter I did not install a single extension, yet I have somewhere around 100 of them. I have dozens for games I don't even have on my computer. And a dozen or so more I have, I have no clue what they even do. @Zanderat showed his extension and it was trim, on one page. Do most people smartly keep an eye on this and throw away whatever junk Vortex is installing there? Is it possible when I was a BETA user for Vortex it installed all this?

Aha! Yes, the message with the button appears for approximately 2 seconds then promptly disappears so that is why I missed it. Literally, it is hard to press the button in time before the message disappears forever. Any reason why this message disappears when all the others stay until you dismiss them?

I tried turning off the Collections extension since I don't use those. It made no difference. From the thread it appears someone discovered that turning off the Mod Dependency Manager extension will stop the madness. I'm assuming that means the subsystem that handles the conflicts so if we removed any conflicts outside Vortex (e.g. combine mods), then we should be able to turn that off, is that correct? This is desperate (as I wait 8 minutes for my mod disable test to complete and another 8 minutes of purging to re-enable it). I was looking at MO2 as a possible escape hatch and that is not easy to find. The github link is deleted. I understand you have to get on discord to try to get it. I don't know why it's so secret. I wonder if the old Wrye Bash can handle it?

400 is medium? You have more mods than I do, I am running in the high 200's. Mine purges for anything. For example, I uninstalled a mod that was already disabled and had to go through the purge.

@Pickysaurus it does not answer the question. I know how to generate the file from settings but where does the file go? What is it named? Does it go to the appdata folders?

@insomnious or @Pickysaurus you are telling us to send logs files and state. The log files are easy enough to find, but the state you only tell us how to generate the backup, not where it is, what folder and what the file will be named. I've scoured Vortex's appdata folder and can only guess what the state files are. You might get more people sending it if you tell us where it is. Thanks!!!

@insomnious thank you for getting back and hanging with this! On your post about the conflicts. I do have several but they have all been resolved in the "Manage Rules" screen. Is it your belief that having conflicts, even if they are resolved in "Manage Rules" screen, will cause this behavior? For example if I combined or removed mods that currently conflict, essentially removing the conflict, do you believe this problem will go away? I'm trying to understand how the conflicts cause the purging, because maybe we can tweak our setups temporarily to get some relief. Also, while the purging is going on, it appears to allow us to continue to download and install mods and possibly even deploy. Will it handle all that properly while purging or should we leave Vortex completely alone during this time? I hit a record last night of almost 8 minutes of purging to enable a single mod.

Hi @Zanderat, when you say you don't have the problem, are you running just a few mods? Do you see a purging go off anytime you do something? Seeing people say that makes me wonder if there is some configuration or something that we can do to alleviate this problem.