Sorry about the wall of text, but this bug has been stalking me for too long... Not too many alternatives to Alternate Start (pardon the pun). It' s pretty much the go-to mod for when you want to skip the Helgen intro. At least in that vein, EpitomeOfShyness's spreadsheet has a tab for mods in the same category. This is, at this point, essential I think, as we're going to have to weigh alternatives on a benefit vs. StrCount basis from here on out. Heck, if this can't be patched, strcount will eventually need to be noted as part of a mod's description. To wit, since I've been fighting this bug for months I'd already made the switch from RND to iNeed (joke was on me :wink:, Frostfall to Hypothermia Plus, VioLens back to Dance of Death, Campfire to CKotNR (and back to Campfire for the build stuff from scratch features), and Convenient Horses to Immersive Horses + Caftable Horse Barding & Simple Follower Mount. I Remember thinking I was finally going to get to try Warzones and WZ: Assault Attack with my new loadout, but my savegames went insta-corrupt at the time, as they did when I finally got around to setting up DynDOLOD 1.46. (BTW, DynDOLOD worked beautifully, didn't even noticeably add to my load times and left me a little awestruck...but also instacorrupt. And I was like, "Wow, how many mod authors can claim both that, holy cow, they fixed and broke Skyrim?) By then I'd figured out that there was some kind of limit involving script load not associated with the same issues that cause latency, but I didn't know exactly what, nor did I have a way of measuring it...just guesswork: http://steamcommunity.com/app/72850/discussions/0/517142892051135426/ So, yeah, almost five years in and after general memory patching (Sheson) and VRAM patching (Boris) we've finally (I think) dug up the source of a third–and most insidious–Skyrim/Papyrus bottleneck. And with long lived mods that are getting heavier and more complex over time (SL, 3DNPC, and Legacy of the Dragonborn are all perfect examples) this was a time bomb just waiting to blow. Thinking back on my 2014-2015 playthrough, at least now I have an explaination as to why it got to the point that I was saving 2 and 3 times within a few seconds as a safety measure because 1 time out of ten the first save of a set would be bad. At least the 255 ESP limit was out in the open. It's actually a little unnerving that after the 28000 strings gobbled up by the base game+DLCs+USLEEP, each remaining ESP only has 150 strings to take up on average over a complete playthrough. And if you want a 15k string buffer at the start, that leaves only about 90. So this changes everything in terms of setting up a loadout. I'd even say it turns some things we were taking for granted on their heads. In that light, I completely ditched my setup last night (based on TESV ESS analysis it was doomed anyway) and reinstalled and cleaned a fresh set of vanilla Skyrim + DLC + HiRes Texture Pack + USLEEP. I started testing just a run through Helgen to Riverwood and back and will start reinstalling installing mods one by one (based on sets/NMM profiles such as UI, Worldspaces, etc.) and testing their cumulative effect on string count as I go. I was really hoping to do a playthrough with Defeat and Submit + DAYMoYL this time around but that requires SL so I'll wait for that to get sorted out, as well as DynDOLOD 1.48 to come out of beta before I start an actual playthrough. FWIW, I've added what I had so far to EpitomeOfShyness's spreadsheet (before I hit the rest button on Skyrim) and I'll be adding more as I get results, but it will probably be over a couple of weeks. I won't be reporting back on 3DNPCs or Immersive Armors, though ; I've really enjoyed these two, but they're not worth the massive hit IMHO. Time to move on to other mods... So far I can confirm that the base game + DLC + HiRes Pack + USLEEP takes up 27900 at the start. An hour later, after going through Helgen down to Riverwood and back while interacting normally with the game world my String Count was up to 27960. But I have a suspicion that this may mostly just be related to the start of minor quests such as talking to Gerdur and talking to the Jarl of Whitterun. So it may not be as bad as 60/hr indefinitely. Other than that, if anyone wants to know: iNeed: 750 vs RND: 245 (went back to RND after using iNeed because it was "script light") Campfire: 650 vs. Camping Kit of the Northern Ranger: 310 vs. Camping Lite: 10 (anything below 80(?) may just be "Quantum String Fluctuations" until we start seeing a trend) Frostfall: 640 vs Hypothermia: 175 vs Hypothermia Plus: 465 Convenient Horses: 535 vs. Immersive Horses + Craftable Horse Barding & Simple Follower Mount: 135 VioLens: 360 vs. The Dance of Death: 30 (went back to DD because I didn't need the extra features of VioLens) So just with those you can go from a max of almost 3000 to a min of 635, saving up to ~2370 strings, depending on what features you can live without. Anyway, I'm not counting on Beth to fix this, they stated quite clearly that the Legendary edition was the very last time they were touching Skyrim (at least as far as TESV)...and I can imagine the processes internally: bug fix request finally gets someone's attention, evaluation by management, fix approval, finding a dev to assign this to, getting the server admin to find the source backups, set up a VM on an overcrowded server, do the patch, go to testing, find out it has/may have impacts elsewhere, back to the dev...who is supposed to be billing to FO4 DLC...guys, this is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. I'll eat a chaurus egg if it does.
