miketheratguy

Well I don't mind someone suggesting their own work. As long as a mod functions without inherent crashes, I'll happily take it from whomever wants to supply it. Thanks, I'll try it out (assuming that it can be used independently from your overhaul mod. I wouldn't be against trying that as well but not just yet, I'm trying to start my mods small for now). Anyone else have any recommendations?

I'm getting back into Oblivion for the first time in years because I've become bored with Skyrim and one of the first things I wanted to do was locate an old mod that adds random travelers to the roads and / or wilderness. Upon investigating I found half a dozen different such mods but every single one that I've found so far has comments about the mod crashing (several of which were due to scripts used by the new NPCs). This reminded me of the fact that one of the reasons why I stopped playing in the first place is because my game used to crash a lot. So, what I'm wondering is this: What mod, if any, adds extra characters to the outside world (roads AND wilderness, I'll take either) but is actually stable and hasn't caused you to crash? Please, personal experience only. I can find lists of various NPC mods, what I'm looking for are individual testimonials about which mods have been verified to work smoothly. Thanks for your help!

Ah, I see. To be honest it's something that I'm considering. I never had consistent problems with it before (that I'm aware of) and the lack of complaints by other users leads me to worry that I'd be abandoning a perfectly good mod just because of what may be problems that I happen to be having on my end. At the same time the mod appears to have been abandoned by the author himself, and I HAVE always had at least intermittent crashes with this mod (though I was never able to isolate them to this mod exclusively). I don't know. It's very frustrating. There are users that can talk of playing a smooth game with more than 200 mods installed, yet I can't decipher these errors enough to know exactly what to ditch and what to keep. I don't go crazy (I've got around 50 mods installed at the moment), I don't overlap, I use NMM and LOOT, I've got the cell stabilizer and memory patch, I use USLEEP, etc etc etc. It's like "how much more careful can I be?" Anyway I'm practicing adding custom armor sets to the leveled lists themselves after which I'll just have to make a bashed patch. I've been trying to avoid this much more time-consuming route but I'm running out of ideas.

What do you mean?

The strange thing is that the mod DOES work, it just seems to crash at apparently random intervals (or, in the case of my test location at Fort Greenwall, consistently). By that I mean that I CAN summon up some bandits and see them wearing the custom armor that I added. It makes me wonder how this isn't a binary matter - why the mods can work perfectly fine one minute and then crash the game the next. I would assume that if there's a problem with the script trying to load the armor, or the armor itself, the game would crash as soon as I activated the mod. The fact that it works for a while but then gives out seems strange. Anyway I do think that I'll try using just these two mods (Mooded Loot and the armor that it activates) on my completely umodded early game save and see what happens. It's going to be a real pain to unplug all of my mods and then reinstall everything but if there's no other way to narrow things down any further I don't know what other choice I have.

Hmm. No changes with anything. After installing Modded Loot and one of the armor mods, I saved the game then exited and reloaded the save. I still crashed in the same spot. Then I edited my mod order by placing the loot mod dead last, then went to try both the save that was made before and the save that was made after I installed it. Still, crashes in the same spot.

First of all, I appreciate your help regardless of the confusion. You obviously know more about this stuff than I do (I've been playing and modding Skyrim for years but I've never delved into any particularly "advanced" stuff such as scripting, Wrye Bash etc.) so you're going to be saying things that I don't really understand, sure, but I'm more or less following you, I think. No, I actually did not save the game at any point past using the loot mod to activate the armor in-game. I'd install the loot and armor mods, load a save from a few nights before, let MCM detect the loot mod, and use it to find and distribute the armor. Then, after crashing, I would use NMM to deactivate the armor, activate a different armor set, reload that same save from a few days prior, and try anew. I can make a new, separate save after loading up the loot and armor mods and reload that save before I try to approach the fort. I'll let you know what happens. As for the load order I ran Loot (which hasn't detected any problems, for whatever that's worth) but now that you mention it, no, I haven't messed with the load order beyond that. I just fired up NMM and see that the loot mod has, in fact, been placed well BEFORE the armor mods. I wonder if something so stupidly simple could be the whole problem? I guess I never really thought about it, I just trusted Loot to do its thing. This probably still wouldn't explain why my game would randomly crash during the other times that I tested it, but it could very well explain why I'm now getting consistent crashes at the spot I've been testing in. I'll go try out the save / reload scenario with the fort, then after I've done that I'll change the load order to place the loot mod last and do what I've been doing to see if I get any different results.

I understand, you didn't say that it was a guaranteed certainty or anything but simply that the error was the additem script. I guess I just figured that this must be related to the loot mod and not the armor itself. I know that some armors come with scripts but I don't believe that any of the ones that I tried did. Also, I got this error with about six different sets. I'd turn on the loot mod and the armor mod then load up a clean save that was made before either one were installed. I'd go into the loot mod's MCM menu to have it load up the armor set. Once successful, I'd approach a fort where I knew many enemy bandits would be, and the game would abruptly crash to the desktop once I got close. I'd then remove that armor mod, install a different one, and repeat the process: Load up the clean save, set the loot mod to activate the new armor, and approach the fort. Another crash. If, however, I loaded up the save with the loot mod and any of the armor mods installed but did NOT "activate" the loot mod in-game by telling it to search for the armor, then the game would proceed like normal and not crash. The loot mod would be on, the armor would be on, and I'd be able to go craft it for myself if I wanted to. The crash would come if I activated the armor through the loot mod and approached the fort again. That's why it made perfect sense to hear that the error had something to do with an add item script. To your questions, no, the armor that I've been adding is custom armor made by individual users (Dreamburrows, etc). As to whether it's wearable by a bandit, I'm not sure what you mean. It's just a set of meshes and textures meant to be worn by the player, but which the loot mod has dynamically added to the bandits due to the settings that I selected (it could also be added to dragons and giants but I chose bandits specifically because the bandits would actually wear them). In other words the armor doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary, just custom armor for use on the player or his followers. If it helps the bandits in the game do, in fact, wear the armor once it's been added - in areas of the game where I don't crash reliably, I can encounter bandits wearing the various pieces. The problem is that the game will seemingly crash at random when spawning bandits with the armor on - sometimes I can approach an area where I encounter bandits wearing custom armor, sometimes I can approach that same area and crash. In the case of this specific error log I was testing out an area that, for some reason, would crash consistently. I'm not sure why that spot is reliably unstable, but I guess I'm not as concerned about that. My problem was with trying to understand why the loot mod / armor sets were making the game crash at all.

Okay, so the error is NOT in the armor itself, but rather the script that's trying to apply the armor to the bandits. Thank you, that really helps a lot. At least now I know which component is causing the problem, and that's a huge step forward. Very disappointing, since this is by far the easiest way I'm aware of to add modded armor to leveled lists, but still good to narrow things down. I haven't seen others post the same type of crashing issue so I was worried that it could be something else, and wouldn't know how to find out what. I've written to the mod author to no avail. This is one of those all too common situations where someone came out of nowhere with an awesome mod that seemed to work great, promised an update, then disappeared before the update or any answers to bug fixes. It's so frustrating because this is one of the few mods that I truly consider "must-have", since fighting the same enemies with the same loot and the same outfits over and over and over again is one of the things that really drags down the sense of immersion or excitement when playing this game. I've tried looking into other ways to add a bunch of custom armors myself but it's all so over my head and consists of so many steps that I think doing so would take days, if not weeks. The mod is called "Modded Loot". http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/64778/?

Thanks for the reply. Is there any way to know what's actually causing this to happen so I can go about trying to fix it or attempt some kind of alternative? Basically what's happening in that error is that I've installed a mod of armor that would normally only be available through crafting, and have installed and activated a mod that's trying to apply that armor to some bandits at a fort that I'm approaching. Is there a way to determine what's causing the -1 error in that scenario?

I've spent days trying to add some armor sets to the leveled lists of my game so that enemy NPCs (bandits, primarily) will occasionally wear them. I'm not at all familiar with Wrye Bash and the process of manually editing leveled lists seems incredibly time-consuming and needlessly complicated, so for a while now I've been using this mod: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/64778/? which allows the user to specifically choose item esps from the load order and add them to enemy inventory. The problem is that my game seems to be crashing pretty regularly whenever I try to add a handful of armor and for the longest time I haven't been able to figure out whether it's a ram issue, specific armor issue, an issue with that loot mod, or what. Just this morning I was able to find a spot where the game crashes reliably whenever I've used the mod to apply some armor. It doesn't seem to matter which armor I try to apply and it doesn't happen if the mod is dormant (ie, active but not trying to apply any armor). The Skyrim error logs report the following: [05/03/2016 - 07:21:48PM] Error: Array index -1 is out of range (0-99) stack: [Active effect 2 on (1700FF8A)].DSerItemAdderScript.OnEffectStart() - "DSerItemAdderScript.psc" Line 116 Can anyone tell me what this means, or more specifically, what I can to do try to fix the problem? (Bonus points for anyone who has an easier or more reliable way to make enemy NPCs wear modded armor that I add to the game, such as some kind of leveled list script or something).

"SirSalami". I dig the name.

I've never installed any of the unofficial patches but have been putting a lot of thought into doing so now (I've simply always been worried that some of my mods will wind up being incompatible, leading to an even less stable game than I already have. Skyrim is a finicky little b****). Would you recommend that I go ahead and install all the patches (minus HD, as I don't use it) now and then update with the oncoming release, or would it be better just to wait?

Lol that's actually a rather good point. The only reason I'm looking to be able to do this is because some poor sod has not yet offered a patch that will allow all of these files to work with one another, and for that reason I feel like the sod will have to be me. It's not that these mods don't play well together in one fashion or another (pretty much any two of them will work without conflict), it's that using all four will overwrite like crazy and prevent me from enjoying their individual features. I respect the advice to just choose what I want the most and live with it, but I'm willing to try to make a patch for myself to get the effects from all of them. I know that it will be a learning process but it seems as if it's my only option. I just don't know if it's TES5Edit or Wrye Bash (or perhaps even something else) that is the correct tool to accomplish this.

I'm at my wit's end trying to create a stable game of Skyrim that allows me to use the mods that I actually want to use. Basically, I'm looking to have all of these mods working with (that is, not overwriting) each other: Skyrim Climate Overhaul: Summer edition Audio of Skyrim Sounds of Skyrim (all 3 modules) Enhanced Lighting and FX (plus its Enhancer and Exterior plugins) The first mod, SCO, turns the Skyrim landscape pleasant and summery while also adding some weather effects. Audio of Skyrim replaces and enhances existing sounds. Sounds of Skyrim adds new sounds to the game. ELFX changes the lighting / shadows of interior and exterior areas of the game. The problem is that each of these mods seems to alter some of the same cells, and obviously only the last one on the list will take effect. I'd like to get them all playing alongside each other but I don't know how to go about doing that. I've been looking for the last hour and some people recommend a bashed patch, others say that a bashed patch is only for leveled lists and to use TES5Edit to make a merged patch, then someone said TES5Edit requires a special script, someone else said that TES5Edit will not "accept" merged patches anymore, still others say that merging is automatic but I still have to delete actual records myself, and...well you get the point. Basically I'm just trying to learn the easiest and most automated way to combine these mods in such a way that they'll all have their effects in my game without overruling one another. Please help!