Trying to figure out the cause of a freeze/crash

[PancakeTaker2]

Title pretty much says it all. Despite me having Buffout 4 installed and trying everything I can to set my INIs up properly, no log appears and nothing I change seems to really help.

But this is because of how it crashes, I suspect, since Buffout can't really generate crash logs of freeze crashes unfortunately.

With about 558 Mods in total and 447 plugins, I barely have any other issue. Compatibility between mods is relatively fine, LOD looks good, framerate is about the best I can get it (on average about 60-70 FPS except around Boston, naturally), and I've done everything I can to keep the number of scripts running at once pretty low while still having plenty of gameplay additions and such. But whether in a completely silent/empty scenario or a gigantic battle, it's a dice roll on if my game freezes, pops audio a couple times, and then fully crashes without generating a log. The chances of that happening also seemingly increase if I let the game autoload after death or me manually trying to load a save.

I've had a couple theories - memory leak, maybe a corrupt NIF or texture file, yet I can't entirely tell since I can't replicate the freeze/crash by going to any location or interacting with some part of gameplay - it just happens seemingly at random.

I'm genuinely at a loss. I've redone my INIs a few times, double checked my load order/mod orders; I even remember testing a pretty barebones modlist with F4SE fixes, the Unofficial Patch, and the Community Fixes Merge being the only mods active and it still resulted in the same sort of freeze/crash.

Any suggestions?

[Qrsr]

Disable all, enable step by step

[Karna5]

While Qrsr's suggestion is both wise and sensible, I sympathize with PancakeTaker2 that disabling 448 plugins and even more mods really isn't an option.

What I usually do in such a situation is:

1. Sort my mod manager to tell me what the most recent mod updates were, and then I disable just the most recent mods. Doing this I've found that in some cases mods meant to stabilize my game often had patches which destabilized them. For instance, SUP F4SE has caused terrible issues for me in some updates, so I always keep the previous working version when I install a new one until I know it's stable.

Buffout 4 almost invariably clashes with my mods, crashing me, but that's because Buffout 4 is intended to run with mods such as those in the "Read the F*c*ing" manual mod list which I do not use. I use the alternate Indarello patch mod list which doesn't need Buffout 4 to run.

2. Obviously check your mod manager to make sure you have fewer than 255 non-ESL plugins active. I'm not directing this step at PakcakeTaker2, of course, as nobody gets to 448 plugins without knowing this step.

3. Look for patterns. As crazy as it might seen, crashes and freezes really are not random. A few examples of issues I was able to narrow down through careful and lengthy testing were:

a. A couple of times I hit performance caps graphically. If you're playing at 4k resolution, try dropping to 2k resolution and check whether that stabilizes you. I don't currently have such a performance cap, but I did in the past.

b. One thing I learned while working on my Fable Paintings mod is that you can lock up the game if you have too many loose file textures in one directory. It's not a problem if they're spread out across many directories, but it's a definite problem in a single directory. Check what you installed with loose files, and try disabling it. I prefer loose files in general because the Fallout 4 engine doesn't read them until they're needed (unlike BA2 files which are read at startup and carrying around constantly), but it's a situational pro and con which needs an awareness of what you've installed and which is best.

c. If there's a texture file which is off by even one pixel in a width or height, that can crash the engine. So if you installed any mod with textures lately, either temporarily uninstall it, or proof read all the textures.

4. I made the mistake of changing some of my ini files several months ago, and my game destabilized horribly. It was a nightmare to fix because I accidentally didn't keep a backup. What eventually worked for me was to delete my ini files, launch the game directly through steam (not F4SE) to trigger a regeneration of vanilla ini files, and then searched my old ini files to restore lines I liked and need. Nothing short of deleting and restarting my ini files worked to restabilize my game once the ini files broke.

5. One of the hardest things I had to trouble shoot were crashes related to animations. I ran into this two ways.

a. I had a super hard to track pattern which I accidentally finally nailed down by figuring out I crashed if I ran or walked full speed but not if I sneaked or walked slow speed. This made me realize that a while back I had uninstalled a large mod which included girly animations (even though it wasn't a mod about girly animations), and when I uninstalled that mod, it broke my jog and run animations. I went to Nexus Mods and installed Girly Animations directly (something I hadn't used in a few years), and my game re-stabilized, and I was able to jog and run safely again.

b. A few weeks ago I had a case where I nailed down the pattern, through careful testing, to be that if I was on the ground and got up, or if I jumped off anything and had to use the landing animation, I crashed. Going back to older saves fixed the issue, but I wanted to identify what the problem was, so I kept working on it until I realized it happened when I allowed Screen Archer Menu to run a few animations (something I nearly never ever do because I usually either run them directly by console command or through AAF and mods which use AAF). The S.A.M. had destabilized my game, so although I was forced to go back to an older save, I at least now know what is dangerous to use and am careful not to use S.A.M. for animations anymore.

In summary, you do eventually hit a point where uninstalling everything and re-installing one at a time is more work than looking for patterns. It generally takes many years to get a stable game hundreds of interdependent and stable plugins and mods, and to uninstall everything is surely a task with difficult weeks of work.

So for people (which includes me) who have that many mods, the answer to destabilization is a matter of detective work rather than mods like Buffout 4 or starting over.

[fraquar]

Quote

I even remember testing a pretty barebones modlist with F4SE fixes, the Unofficial Patch, and the Community Fixes Merge being the only mods active and it still resulted in the same sort of freeze/crash.

Read what you posted - a couple of times.

The hardest part of finding the cause of a crash is the process of elimination.    You really don't have much left to eliminate.

Personally, I'd look at Community Fixes Merged as the culprit - and test my theory.

-----

The whole point of testing is to eliminate potential causes - but you stopped eliminating them.

 

    

 

[Karna5]

11 minutes ago, fraquar said:

Personally, I'd look at Community Fixes Merged as the culprit - and test my theory.

I never did understand why community fixes and patches are so popular. They usually try to fix things which aren't even broken. I wouldn't dream of installing such a patch if:

a) I don't need it, and

b) it didn't actually do something specific I need to with a particular mod or set of mods.

For instance, I mention I use the Indarello patch for some animations, but it actually does stuff (adding certain combinations of animations and conditions not native to some installed animations). And it's completely stable and doesn't need patches or utilities to stabilize it.

But the idea of needing to install a patch for stability makes no sense to me. If something is unstable, one shouldn't be trying to patch it. One should simply not install it.

It's why I don't use Buffout 4, for instance. Anything that needs Buffout 4 to run (such as the Read the F* Manual set of patches) is something I simply refuse to install. I understand why some people might install it anyway because that procedure's patch is geared toward male gay animations, so if someone is willing to get instability to get more male gay animations, that's up to them. But there's a price for installing anything unstable.

[fraquar]

Buffout 4 at least makes sense in that it is addressing game issues at the engine level - and we all know Bethesda is trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip with this aging engine continually asking it to do things it's simply not designed for.   

Starfield anyone?

 

[PancakeTaker2]

Appreciate the insight, gives me more to go off of. My best guesses now might be textures since you did mention that archives are loaded and kept pretty much all throughout. Maybe I need to unpack some mods?

Also personally I like using community fixes and patches since most of the time they're useful for fixing up the base game first and then you can use that as a foundation. To each their own of course, but that's my take.

I should also mention that it isn't particularly a headache when it does crash as I have periodic autosaves and the crashes themselves are after like 2-3 Hours of playing the game/having it run. I may have to retest the barebones build I mentioned to see if it actually did have a crash similar like that or not, or my memory borked itself.

 

Either way, appreciate the replies

[Karna5]

4 minutes ago, fraquar said:

Buffout 4 at least makes sense in that it is addressing game issues at the engine level

I can respect that. As I said, Buffout 4 crashes my game. It's designed for people who use a certain set of mods and patches meant to go with Buffout 4, and I don't use those mods and patches. But I do get it, and I recognize there are tens of thousands (if not more) users who use Buffout 4 and its set of mods and patches.

Buffout 4 is not compatible with the mods I use, but fortunately we can all make our games the way we like them.

[LarannKiar]

Have you checked the Event Viewer? It may worth giving a try.

[PancakeTaker2]

Honestly incredible idea, really wish I thought of that before lol

Gave it a look on one of my last crashes - it spewed out plenty of details but it appears the "fault" that caused the error was "ntdll.dll" - I think I've seen this around a couple times before? Now to figure it out a bit...

Thanks for the tip