Crash To Desktop (CTD) Cure-All

[brucethemoose]

I'm going to say it one last time.

Don't use the OP's advice if your experiencing crashes. The post is hopelessly outdated, misleading & full of information that will lead to you wasting your time.

Disabling mods does absolutely nothing to help. The only way to safely find out if a mod (or which one) is causing your CTD is to uninstall every single one, and then re-install one at a time (each time, loading your game to see if it still CTD's)

Do this until you've found the culprit mod and delete it.

If after doing this, you're still experiencing CTD's, then it's likely that the savefile your using is corrupted, in most cases due to installing/uninstalling different mods whilst you've been playing.

There's a slightly better strategy than that.

 

First, you disable all your mods and check for a CTD, like you said.

 

Then you enable 1/2 of them. If you CTD, you know a problem is in that 1/2. If you don't, it's in the other 1/2.

 

Enable the non-problem mods, and disable 1/2 of the potential problem ones (so 3/4 of your mods are enabled). Repeat.

 

 

If you have a giant mod list, this lets you converge on the problem mod much more quickly, especially if it's an inconsistent CTD or a system hang.

[SMB92]

F4 Modding 101:

 

Learn to use xEdit to identify and fix soft conflicts + manually make merged patches or identify hard conflicts and remove mods

 

Learn what goes into your save game and know what mods are likely to need extra care

 

Learn what precombined meshes are as well as previs, and why this is such an important factor when modding.

 

I've had savegames that have been running for 100s of hours with many mod changes, very few times have I broken one badly, because I spent a lot of time learning the above.

[Akulakha]

Just so you guys know I was just dealing with some crashes not too long ago. When I disabled my Vsync everything started working fine.

[skannerz22]

crashes related to too many mods or old mods sometimes bad mods

 

try using this

 

it doesn't prevent corrupt data from being created, it merely clears it from the memory before it piles up too much the piling up of errors causes the crash or graphical glitch in most cases

 

kind of like spraying foam on a leaking pipe, the pipe is still broken and the pipe could break in a different spot at any moment but atleast it stopped flooding the floor for the time being

[Greg4474]

WRONG. I broke the game and had to reinstall. Bad explanation of what to delete.

[MightyZ0G]

WRONG. I broke the game and had to reinstall. Bad explanation of what to delete.

whose advice did you follow?

[RasterOps]

brucethemoose

is right about finding a bad mod. Out of desperation I was fooled by the OP as well as others. Now I'm reloading game content (23%, 2.9 MB/s)...

This morning my game was running fine (vanilla + DLC, to get some achievements). This afternoon I reinstalled my mods. I updated all those that had newer versions including F4SE and deleted a few mods. Had to reinstall NMM and let it remove some mods (odd). Now the engine won't start a new game or load a save.

I ran LOOT and sorted the list. I verified that there were no errors in the PlugIn tab. I disabled all mods in the plugin tab and the game still crashes. Then I disabled them all on the Mods tab; game still crashes. The game files were checked and Steam fixed a few (before I deleted the games files in the data folder...) Game still crashes.

Guess I just have to wait for the game files to re-install to see if the OP's delete step caught something (30%, 3.1 MB/s). It's late, I'll try again in the morning.

Edited September 16, 2017 by RasterOps

[sopmac45]

F4 Modding 101:

 

Learn to use xEdit to identify and fix soft conflicts + manually make merged patches or identify hard conflicts and remove mods

 

Learn what goes into your save game and know what mods are likely to need extra care

 

Learn what precombined meshes are as well as previs, and why this is such an important factor when modding.

 

I've had savegames that have been running for 100s of hours with many mod changes, very few times have I broken one badly, because I spent a lot of time learning the above.

 

 

I completely agree with SMB92 on this but is not that easy to learn xEdit and fix whatever is causing the problem and it is more difficult to make a patch.

 

There is a video in SMB92 mod : WOTC ( War of the Commonwealth ) that explain very superficial how to handle this important tool but .... is lacking the details that new players need to know to put our hands into this tool.

 

It would be an excellent idea that somebody with the full knowledge, create this detailed procedures ( with screen shots and everything ) and probably sell us the access to it so we can learn. I have not found anything in the net that really teach me how to do that SMB92, so despite your suggestion is absolutely valid and the best, not everybody has your knowledge. You are a modder and for you is very easy to handle and patch up some mods and make them work and avoid CTD's.

 

I do agree that we also learn by trying and trying till you know but there has to be some detailed procedures, a detailed tutorial that give me more than a slight insight in order for me to learn and fix whatever problem I may encounter.

 

I would love to learn how to use xEdit and even create some mods, but so far, not one out there is providing the full details on how to do it. Believe me that if I knew, I would create a tutorial with very detailed procedures and I would sell it so a lot of players will benefit from it and will avoid too many frustrating issues.

[sopmac45]

I disagree with the OP as well. There are dozens of causes for a game to CTD and not just one.

 

For instance, I've seen that players that experiment a lot of CTD's, have dozens of mods installed and mods that I've never seen in the most endorsed or most downloaded list and even some mods listed in those sections, from recognized modders, have not been updated. Some of them are saying to add this or that line to your .ini files and that is not necessary anymore. Gopher's video is the ONLY one that we should follow to prepare Fallout 4 to be modded and nothing else.

 

Also, these players install perhaps 150 or 200 + mods and even ask the question : how many mods I can install in FO4 ? ... they do not realize that is not about quantity but about quality, it is about to add something to your game that the game itself cannot give you to make it better and you do not have to install dozens of mods to make that happen.

 

They do not realize that the more mods you install, the more chances for your game to CTD. They do not install mods 5 by 5, play and see if they are working ok ... they just install at the time whatever amount they want and when they start experiencing CTD's, they want the solution and that is not that easy to find out.

 

Others believe that because they do have the Nvidia 1080, they can install whatever amount and have 60 fps in every single corner of the map and never have to experience any CTD ... wrong !! This is not about how good your rig is but about a lot of things that I still do not know yet but after one year playing with mods and after several times re-starting this game, and after too many times asking questions here and there, investigating on my own, I still do not have all the answers but I can say that I have learned to play ONLY with those mods that I know never caused any CTD and again, I do not play with quantity but quality.

 

I won't get into what I have done because it would be too extensive but a lot of people in this thread have said very important things to apply and avoid CTD's. LOOT is necessary but is not the CTD-avoider-god-tool ... we need to read the mod description and look for compatibility and load order's suggestions from the author and stick to those recommendations by the letter. This is probably one very important thing that some people does not do because they do not want to read or investigate.

 

Again, it is not about just about do this and that; if it was that simple nobody would have CTD's ever .... but installing dozens of mods at a time is not ( for sure ) the best thing to do in the first place. DO NOT install mods which effect you can get via console commands !! A simple rule that I apply for my own. I can get a million caps via console command so why do I need to add a mod that allow vendors to have more caps ? This is just a sample. One less mod and one less headache. We need to eliminate options not to add more trouble, this is what I do IMHO. One of the things and I am not going to list all of them.

[JimmyRJump]

I think I musthave tried around 75% of FallOut 4 mods available on the Nexus and am constantly at or near the 255 plug-ins limit. Haven't played for a while now but I was at 255 plugs and a total of 453 mods (near 2000 are sitting in NMM, some of them multiple times according to updates I downloaded and former versions I kept), without too many crashes.

 

The most common CTD in FO4is due to bad RAM/V-RAM allocation, an ailment that will only be done away with when the game will be properly adapted for PC instead of being a poorly ported version.

 

When I still used my MSI R7970 Lightning GPU, I experienced crash after crash, until I bought an MSI RX470 GamingX 8GB GPU in August 2016. The Lightning had only 3GB of V-RAM and the 5GB extra did away with 98% of the crashes I had...

 

For the rest, there's too many people running too many apps and stuff on their gaming rig. Even some Anti-Virus solutions have been/are known to interfere and crash the game. I'm using BitDefender which has the possibility to add games to its profile so that the AV keeps from interfering when a game is open.

 

Some folks even experience problems with MSI AfterBurner, something I've never had in the almost 15 years I use AfterBurner...

 

Point of the matter is that FO4 is still a badly optimized game with poorly allocated memory which can and will make the game go belly-up on occasion.