Something that could be causing your crashes.

[FishBiter]

Hello, FishBiter here, and I figured I would share with you something that I recently discovered was the culprit behind my crashes.

 

<Error: Cannot be resolved>

 

It was that little phrase right there that I found sitting in the .esp for one of my mods. In this particular case, it was present in the records for various scrolls. The reason I came upon this was that I was consistently crashing when I tried to trade with certain mages at the college of Winterhold, so I decided to find out what the game was using to determine the loot those vendors had using TESVEdit. Narrowing it down, I eventually found that the scrolls that the vendors had in their leveled lists were the culprit, and found that several entries in their records had been replaced with <Error: Cannot be resolved>.

 

This problem was simply solved by putting the correct entries back in where the errors had been, and I was once again able to trade with those vendors crash-free.

 

 

So then later on, suddenly and mysteriously, Skyrim started freezing at the main menu, right before the "New/Continue/Load" options come up. After a few dead ends, I decided to see if a mod was causing this, and I managed to narrow it down to one particular mod. I opened the .esp for that mod in TESVEdit, and used the Check For Errors function. Boom, a bunch of errors in some race records. In this case I reinstalled the .esp from the mod, checked it in TESVEdit, saw there were no errors, and after that the game loaded normally again.

 

 

After these two experiences, I started wondering what other errors there might be. I went directly to one .esp file that I knew had a lot of entries and had last say on a lot of things, SUM.esp from the SUM mod; this mod is a skyproccer that takes all your other skyproccers and combines them into one .esp. I did Check Errors.... oh wow, look at all those errors! The interesting thing was that these errors didn't start in SUM, they started in the mods that SUM was getting the records for. Several of them came from my own Merged.esp (which I created both to combine mods that didn't really need their own seperate .esp, and because I discovered that many important keywords were not being carried forward in armors, and finally so that anytime i wanted to change a mod I had somewhere to make overrides rather than altering the original .esp). Of the ones that popped up from other mods it was predominantly keywords that had become <Error: Cannot be resolved> in armors and weapons. I corrected the errors by refilling records and reinstalling .esps, reran SUM, and the errors were gone from SUM.esp.

 

I have to wonder how many random crashes this could have caused. One of the affected records was for some of the bandit armors, so likely it was possible that I would enter an area, the game would spawn a bandit wearing that armor and then crash because of the error.

 

I'm still not sure where these errors came from. They sure weren't there when I first installed the .esps, as evidenced by them not being there when I reinstalled. I'm wondering if SUM or TESV had something to do with it, but I don't have anything definite to base that on.

 

 

TL;DR - If you get crashes and you know it's not because you're using up too much memory, try checking some of your mods with TESVEdit's Check Errors feature. <Error: Could Not Be Resolved> = crash

[prod80]

SkyProc mods always have tons of errors... just know that :wink:

 

When I check mine tes5edit overloads the screen in error messages, yet the game is stable and everything works... and it's a known thing that skyproc patches have a billion errors with out of order records and the likes.

 

I think there's something else not right in your mods (mainly because you resolve it with reinstalling the mods - indicating something is wrong with them), but tes5edit is there to show you :smile: its a great tool for that... people should really start using it more often, would help as well for everyone to understand what a load order actually does and why stuff out of order sometimes doesn't work.

[FishBiter]

The reinstalling was only the case once. The other times it was just moving the records in to replace the errors, so I know that it was the errors. In the case of the reinstall, the errors actually came back ( the errors were in that esp btw, not in a skyproc esp ) and the second time around I didn't reinstall and just moved the correct records in to replace the errors, with the same effect. Trust me, it was the errors causing the crashes :)

[prod80]

sure I believe you :) no worries.. errors cause problems and need to be fixed. SkyProc however has always been dirty on my system (out of order subrecords) but it didn't cause any issues. I guess it's because minor changes in the main files compared to the stats.xml it uses as source for the patching... or just plain good 'ol problems in the mods due to bugs inside of the CK causing some issues inside of SkyProc.

 

IMO it's always a bit tricky to advise people who might or might not have a broken game to check inside tes5edit for errors/warnings... When stuff isn't broken, don't try and fix it. If it works it works :P People messing in tes5edit without actually knowing what to look for, because they don't have a problem, are likely to break stuff by just doing something to at least not feel useless...

 

This is the same for cleaning the Bethesda masters... why clean if no issues? I have seen so many people here coming with broken games after cleaning those files while they had perfectly working games before the cleaning. They end up re-downloading the masters and reinstalling all mods they also cleaned because "why not, I'm busy now anyway". Many problems can simply be sorted by proper use of load order (and no, you don't use BOSS for that, BOSS is just a general guideline and shouldn't be used on large load orders, but that's my opinion).

[FishBiter]

Well in this case it directly solved not just one, but several crash/infinite load issues, so it's worth it to put it out there.

 

Also, ever since fixing the errors in my other esps, my skyproc patch esp no longer has errors in it. Turns out all those errors were coming out of other esps, rather than the skyproc patcher itself :)

Edited July 13, 2013 by FishBiter