Broken mod file

[radovan]

Hi everyone.

I started to create my own mod file by combining different mods together, adjust them a bit to my taste and make them compatible. Now the .esp file is about 33 mb in size, contains a few hundred of mods. But now construction set is unable to save file, even when I dont change anything. It happens after I merge some more new things into this file using TES4Edit, but it was almost a month ago and I dont remember exactly, what it was. Now I need to find out, what is causing problem, and remove it by TES4Edit to make mod working with CS again. Do anyone has an idea, how to do it? Thank you very much for any advice.

[ThomasKra]

You might want to consider switching to the ESM + ESP method for that mod, as you are approaching the limit of the size of an ESP the CS can handle.

[radovan]

Thank you for advice, but it doesnt help. After splitting mod to esp and esm I found that I can save esm without problem (with CS extender), but esp is still broken. Can anyone help me with this?

[David Brasher]

Sorry to say it, but merging mods can be dangerous. When certain mods are merged together, the resulting mod cannot be saved if edited in the CS, it will just crash. I am not sure if it is really known what causes this problem. There seems to be a correlation between the problem and mods with scripts, parenting, quests, dialog, AI packages, and large mod size.

 

This may be bitter advice, but I don't think you will be able to fix your giant .esp. It would be faster and less frustrating to build a new giant .esp than to try to diagnose and fix the old one, since people don't have a clear idea of what to look for in the buggy mod since the CS itself is buggy.

 

To build a giant .esp, since you know it is likely to develop the problem you currently have, you could merge a few mods at a time. Then you could make a save in your archive that you will not overwrite so that you can revert to your big .esp at this stage if you encounter problems in the future. Next you could open your mod in the CS and see if it will save. If it will, you can repeat these steps again by adding more mods. If you do it over and over, you will have a big list of archived saves you can revert to, and will eventually have a giant .esp that can still be saved in the CS, because at the point where you found the incompatible mod, you backed up to a save and chose not to include the mod that messes things up in your giant file.

[radovan]

Thank you very much for this information. But it is impossible for me to rebuilt mod, because I am working on it for more than 2 years and I dont have time to strat again. And I dont remember all mods I used for this. But thanks. Anyone with any other idea? I would really appreciate it.

[David Brasher]

You could do destructive testing on your giant mod file.

 

First back up your file and keep one copy where you won't edit it.

 

Then make other copies and surgically destroy large portions of them. The CS modcleaning function will often work without a crash in instances where saving in the CS would certainly crash. TES4Edit can also do modcleaning of unstable files without having a crash. So since you can't save in the CS, you could use CS modcleaning to see if you can get to a point where it will let you save, or TES4Edit Modcleaning to create files that you will test to see if they can be saved in the CS.

 

So what you would do is take a copy of your file and amputate half of it. You would find some real clear dividing line to make the cut. That way you will know exactly what you did and what happened and have an idea of what to try in your next experiment.

 

So if you cut out half of your file, and it works and can be saved in the CS, you know that your problem is in that half. So you go back to the original file and only cut out half of the bad half and test again. You keep on going. Cut out half of a half of a half. Carefully record where you are at and what you cut out. You will eventually find the bad part of your mod that prevents the CS from saving. Then you will be back in business.

 

Unless you have hit the barrier where your file is too large and cannot exist as an .esp instead of an .esm, then you will be looking for some particular problem component. Likely suspects are things like scripts, parenting, quests, dialog, and AI packages.

[radovan]

Thank you very much everybody. I finally find a solution. I had to wait until I bought new PC, because old one was a piece of crap. I tried to clean mod one part in time with TES4Edit and after just few minutes find out that problem was in one creature edit, where I changed some values from master and set wrong combat style (I deleted original combat style from master and forgot set any new one, and result was wrong edit). So be careful when editing master file.