Vortex 1.12.0-BETA.2 Starfield crash

[kanguru]

I don't know that this crash is due to the BETA.2 update of Vortex 1.12.0, just that it has been happening regularly since then.

I see the crash regularly when loading recent saves for Starfield (exit saves, auto saves and regular saves).

If I downgrade to 1.11.7 I get the same crashes. New games work fine.

Seems like there's a problem with my saves, doesn't it?

HOWEVER When I upgrade to 1.12.0-BETA.2 again, I can load saves that were crashing only a few minutes ago without problems! I've followed this path three times so far and I see the same crashes each time, then things just start working again.

Anyone seen anything as weird as this before? Do I win an award?

[Pickysaurus]

Vortex wouldn't cause your game to crash itself so the problem is to do with your choice of mods 

[Citadel535]

I had crashing on entering New Atlantis after the security checkpoint area, consistent across saves. I fixed that by deleting the pipeline cache which seemed to resolve it after a rebuild. No idea why since I thought that was compiled shaders and I don't remember changing shaders. Click start > run type %localappdata%, go to starfield folder, delete pipeline.cache. This folder is hidden in windows so you may need to show hidden files and folders in explorer.

I also had crashing on fast travel - fixed that by removing a bunch of apartment mods and weapon skin mods (WSEP). Not sure why those mods would do it, either it's just too much stuff being loaded in the game, or they have a rogue edit that breaks something. Removing them stopped the crash on fast travel.

I am only running Eli's Akila apartment mod for housing mods and seems stable, still run a bunch of KryoZet and Zone79 other mods though as well as bug fixes.

Unfortunately with modding, it's painful and a process of elimination to find the culprit when a mod is causing trouble. Have to turn it off and on one at at a time to find it. As it is I had invisible enemy ships with just like the doors flying around, turns out for some reason turning off useful brigs fixed that.

I just started using Trainwreck which is a logger so looking forward to see if crashes occur can figure out what's doing it.

[kanguru]

In theory, I'm sure that's right; Vortex itself shouldn't cause a game crash.

In practice, however, it's all software, which has been known to do things it's not supposed to; all software has bugs, apparently.

I appreciate that it's unlikely Vortex is responsible, but I thought I'd ask and see if anyone else had seen this behaviour.

I wonder how I could debug further? Vortex.log and file tree checksums from the deployments where the game works compared to where it doesn't? I'll see if that shows anything.

Any other debugging advice is welcome.

[kanguru]

Thanks, @Citadel535 I get what you're saying about the painful process of tracking down a mod responsible for crashes. I have already been through the "disable recently changed mods" dance without finding a culprit. I've done binary search-like disabling before (never as simple as it sounds) and will probably be doing it again.

In this case, it does not feel like a mod problem: the same collection of mods both works and does not work to load my most recent saves. That said, it doesn't feel like a Vortex problem, either, given that while it arrived with 1.12.0-BETA.2, it stuck around after downgrading to 1.11.7 and then disappeared temporarily after reinstalling 1.12.0-BETA.2 before returning after the system was rebooted (nice to have a workaround, but it sure is fiddly).

Thanks for the "delete pipeline cache" suggestion. I'll test that and see if it helps.