Unstable Cells

[Drakeero]

I first encountered an unstable cell somewhere in the "vincinity" of Kvatch I believe. Trying to enter it caused an immediate CTD. I say somewhere because I thought little of it and mostly ignored it. Just walked around and continued on my way. Didn't miss out on anything except maybe some alchemical plants.

 

However, I began walking down to Leyawiin to finish my mage's guild recommendations and pick up my third playerhouse. Since I use a mod that disables fast travel until you reach the locations I had to follow the road down from Bravil. Along the way I came across a large "square" of missing terrain. On the tab-map it was indeed an empty square filled with water. A wooden bridge stopped mid-air and it was just a bunch of water with what looked like a second ground underneath it. The only "ground" that still existed was that second ground that I noticed using the no clip console command elsewhere. The ground you're actually supposed to walk on as well as all the trees and rocks was missing. At that far end of this missing square the path simply started again as if nothing happened high up in the air.

 

Now its gotten very bad. Approaching Leyawiin is a little difficult as there appears to be an unstable zone just outside of the city along its northern wall and extending out over the river a little bit. I have to stick far to the west or east along the paths and not stray inwards in order to reach the city without a CTD. If I enter Leyawiin from the west side everything is stable at first. The "crash line" is a north/south line running straight down Leyawiin that seems to start quite ironically at "The Dividing Line" up north and extends all the way down to the southern wall. Thankfully the Fighter's and Mage's guild are still accessible but nothing beyond them. Entering Leyawiin from the east gate is an instant CTD as soon as soon as the loading bar finishes and the game loads up the city on my screen. [i can see the buildings and guards and all, and I think they might be moving for a fraction of a second rather then frozen before the crash.]

 

I do have a bunch of mods ranging from OOO and MMM to some weather mods, but I don't have any mods that I know of that are actually supposed to change the map in any sort of way. Is there a process I should follow to try to restore Leyawiin to functionality so I can complete any quests? Or is the problem likely so bad/difficult to fix that I'd be better off spending my time finding the console commands to warp to any interior cells I need and/or adjust quest stages?

[David Brasher]

Missing meshes, missing textures, badly done custom creature models, and bad AI are some common causes of CTDs. Enter a cell with these things and it can crash before you even see what it is that is broken.

 

You can systematically remove mods until the problem goes away to isolate the problem mod so that you can remove it or deal with it.

 

If you do not care to isolate the bad mod, perhaps you could just deactivate all non-essential mods (and even some essential ones if required) so that you can get back to playing quests in Leyawiin. (For example, vanilla Oblivion would not likely give you this problem.)

 

The intermittent missing square of landscape is a common Oblivion bug most likely unrelated to your other problems. If the square was missing in the same place 100% of the time for all possible savegames and characters then it would be a mod problem, but it sounds like it did not used to be this way, so it is an intermittent. It is caused by something like a loose object laying on an exterior cell boundary being havoked. That problem in that spot is likely to go away and stop bothering you with no action on your part.