Need a troubleshooting guide

[ThD17gj692]

Could not add 'Albino Races' and 'Book of Earache' to existing mod list (about 200 total) without crashing when trying to 'fast travel', open doors, or just running in the waste. Read about using Merge function in FO3 Edit. Got a long list of error messages starting with four: "Found a REFR reference, expected: HAIR", followed by a list of over 50 messages like this one: "[0403AE99] <Error: Could not be resolved>". I have systematically removed about 50 mods but continue to get the same error messages. I have no idea if these errors are the source of my crashes since removing the above mentioned mods did not change the merge error messages. If creating a Merge plug-in is necessary, why isn't that part of the boilerplate advise in Readme's? Also, most players who use these mods have encountered conflicts resulting in crashes, yet I can't find a troubleshooting guide anywhere. Occasionally, an author might suggest using Geck to resolve conflicts, but how? Like everyone else, I am extremely grateful that authors of these mods are generous enough to share them with us. I would have stopped playing FO3 six months ago if I had not discovered this site and all the amazing mods available. But I'm sure that everyone can understand my twinge of anxiety every time I have to open a door. If anyone knows of a troubleshooting guide or how to resolve my problem of creating a 'merge plug-in' please let me know. Thanks.

[anokii]

It could be as simple as:

 

- load order out of whack - posting your load order would be a good start so we can see what you are trying to do.

 

- if your running 150+ mods you're probably going to run into issues, although the limit is 255 the more you run the higher chance you have of these kinds of problems, you may want to consider culling it down a bit more.

 

- are you running any 'large scale' mods (e.g. FOOK2, FWE, MMM, etc), these will often clash with smaller mods since they are trying to change the same thing. Also if you run something like FOOK2 and FWE together it won't work, another item you need if course is FOIP's for some mods to work together.

 

So post your load order and then maybe we can help.

[GrindedStone]

When you load up the load order with FO3edit you have to wait until it says "finished" at the end. Durring this time it's loading up an posting up messages in the window. While building a load order from time to time you should keep an eye out for long lines of text in these messages. Typically the long text lines are either errors or notes. Maybe one or two notes or a single error isn't that big of a deal. But the mod that is causing it would have to be really great for me to still use it after noticing this. Most of the time when I see that a mod is doing this I end up removing it. One reason being it causes errors when creating merge patch. Also you can't really clean those mods that do that without it causing more problems than cleaning it solves.

 

You can't fix this. It's just a super dirty mod. Drop it an move on. It's a lesson in productivity. Even when you ignore these "dirty mods" someone with near master understanding of all the types of data related to Fallout 3 plus many years working with that data still ends up with a workload of about 40 hours just fixing a list of 100 or 200 mods so that they all work together problem free. That's not counting the time it takes to download, decide, and install those mods. Someone with very little understanding or experience it's going to take weeks of working 8 hours a day to do the same thing. Which in either case nothing says at the end of all the work the whole thing doesn't blow up in your face like a land mine.

 

1. Don't use "Super dirty mods"

 

2. Don't use "Super Huge mods"

 

This cuts the workload down to 25% what it would be. More importanly you just avoided 75% of the major problems.