Going out of my mind, please help!

[Darkanvas]

MO2 has actually entered Beta, so stop using the Alpha version :P hehe

 

https://github.com/TanninOne/modorganizer/releases

 

^ MO2 Beta 1. I have been helping, posting about bugs and helping to iron out bugs on GitHub. It's very active so keep an eye on that for MO2 releases.

 

To repeat MO2 has been in Beta for a day or two now!

[Chaophim]

Have you, at any point, tried putting the mod managers on the default C:\ drive, while leaving the game in it's current place? I believe NMM defaults to C:\ upon install, and that may be for a specific design reason. It then lets you choose which drive your games are on during initial start up, because I believe it cannot detect games across hard drives. As I said, I consider MO a liability in this case because it is still in alpha, and I've never used it either.

 

Also, are your various SSD drives just a partition of a single, internal hard drive or are they completely separate and external?

 

I get you're frustrated, and I can tell you're not being argumentative. I'm used to working in tech support areas with people so I'm just trying everything I can think of, in order.

 

Also one thing I forgot to ask before, do mods that are not just texture replacers or mesh replacers work fine? Like a mod that is only record editing or scripts or something?

I'll answer the questions a bit out of order. :)

 

The SSD drives are seperate. Bought a 128-gig when it was the only 'latest and greatest' option I could afford and used to have to delete/shuffle stuff around when switching between Oblivion, Skyrim, and TTW (my machine seems to be allergic to vanilla FO3, so TTW is the only way I can play it). When Fallout 4's release date was announced, I made 2 purchases: the pre-order of FO4 and a new SSD drive. :)

 

Mods that have .esp's seem to work intermittently. The first that comes to mind is the 'Starter Kit' mod that I mentioned in the OP, where all it does is replace the toy car and baby rattle in the changing table next to Shawn's crib with some head-canon-friendly (Nate was a soldier) vanilla start-up gear. It usually comes dead last in the load order, to make sure that it takes effect. I checked my load order in FO4 edit, applying a filter to show conflicts, etc., and it shows 'green' - no conflicts. Boot it up into the game, though, making sure the mod is enabled dead last in the in-game mod load order as well, and nada. Just a rattle and toy car.

 

On the flip side, there is another mod that adds lootable vault suit boxes to vaults. I do admit that I am thinking there are dirty edits involved in this one, but it has a similar prognosis. Everything looks great in FO4edit...no conflicts reported, but if this mod is too high up in the load order, it doesn't function and the boxes revert to static. What *really* makes this odd, though, is there was an instance where the only mod that loaded after it was one that added new hairs to the game. *Totally* different animals, not even touching the same types of things...or even similar things... but lo and behold, the mod didn't work, thanks to whatever odd conflict it still managed to find. As of last test, it was working in its current load order in the OP. This is one reason why I am suspecting that the load order that Fallout 4's in-game mod manager *shows* us and what it is *actually* loading them as are two totally different things sometimes. The modding community had the same frustrations with the Workshop mod manager for Skyrim, iirc.

 

I am retired from a 30+ year career in the IT industry myself, so I tend to mind that I don't come off as 'that guy' when asking for tech support - you know the one.... "My computer was working just fine till this morning. Fix it for me quickly because it is ALL YOUR FAULT!" I obviously don't have the physical scars to prove it but, as tech support, I've been nailed to that particular cross more times than I care to count. LOL

[Chaophim]

MO2 has actually entered Beta, so stop using the Alpha version :tongue: hehe

 

https://github.com/TanninOne/modorganizer/releases

 

^ MO2 Beta 1. I have been helping, posting about bugs and helping to iron out bugs on GitHub. It's very active so keep an eye on that for MO2 releases.

 

To repeat MO2 has been in Beta for a day or two now!

I just downloaded it. Thank you for this update. Gonna check the changelog and see if any of the fixes match my problems.

[ddavies10693]

I would highly recommend installing to which ever drive the install wizard wants it to default to, if for no other reason than to check another box in the checklist for testing purposes. Hopefully it will default to C:\, from my own experiences and research, many programs work best when installed there, and if MO creates even half as many folders as NMM does upon install, it certainly can't hurt.

[Chaophim]

http://www.seekwithinyou.com/images/tea-meditation-quote-rs.jpg

 

Okay, so taking this approach with it. I'm 'emptying my cup', so to speak.

 

Just wiped the Fallout 4 directory off of the SSD, emptied the recycle bin, copied the files back in from my "Unmodded Game Backups" directory on another drive (20 minutes of copying beats 20 hours of downloading, imho), verified game integrity via Steam, waited an hour for it to replace/update 13 files, updated my "Unmodded Game Backups" directory with the fixed and validated version, wiped all plugins.txt, loadorder.txt, ini files, and saves, and am starting 'from scratch' to make sure that the slate is 100% clean. (My mod download directory is on one of the other drives, so no fresh downloading of mods needed, thankfully.

 

Now, as for your suggestion of...

 

I would highly recommend installing to which ever drive the install wizard wants it to default to, if for no other reason than to check another box in the checklist for testing purposes. Hopefully it will default to C:\, from my own experiences and research, many programs work best when installed there, and if MO creates even half as many folders as NMM does upon install, it certainly can't hurt.

...I plan to do *something* to this effect. Now, with MO, having the mod files on a different drive than the game, you run into 'waiting for the manager to copy them into the VFS' game. As such, installed on the same drive, there is a longer pause between 'click' and 'play' in MO than there is through NMM or from the actual launcher itself as it is. I found this out the hard way when modding Skyrim with just the one small SSD - it took 10 minutes to launch a moderately-modded Skyrim from 'click' to 'play', with me wondering if the game wasn't frozen on an ILS the whole time. Finding out that it wasn't was by total accident - won't go into details, but Mexican food was involved - but needless to say that my giving it the time needed to load instead of ending task in task manager immediately, showed me that there was stuff going on behind the scenes. I'm old-school and can remember the long wait time for a Commodore 64 to load just 100k off of a 1541 drive or, even worse, for a TI-99/a to pull data off of a tape, and this is what that wait feels like. Would rather avoid it if I could, hence the SSD. lol

 

Now, that isn't a 'no'. MO *does* allow you to customize directories (like being able to point it toward that shared downloads directory), so I am going to give your suggestion a partial shot with this new MO2 beta by making the 'install mods to this directory' point to an empty directory on the SSD, while the beta, itself, will be installed to the default directory on C:\

[ddavies10693]

Before you try re-modding the game again, would you mind just reporting on verification that everything wrong with the game works before adding any mods or even installing MO or anything else? such as the load order problems, texture issues, etc? I just want to make sure the game doesn't tell you you're missing files when loading a save on vanilla, and that all textures show up while completely unmodded, just to cover all bases, something I'm sure you understand well.

[Chaophim]

Before you try re-modding the game again, would you mind just reporting on verification that everything wrong with the game works before adding any mods or even installing MO or anything else? such as the load order problems, texture issues, etc? I just want to make sure the game doesn't tell you you're missing files when loading a save on vanilla, and that all textures show up while completely unmodded, just to cover all bases, something I'm sure you understand well.

Sure thing. Firing it up vanilla to build inis, etc., to begin with, so will go ahead and play through the tutorial and save the game upon exit from the vault, etc.,

 

...although, with no mods, there won't be a load order problem, modded textures not loading, etc., but it will verify if mods are what is killing the elevator door at least.

[Chaophim]

Okay. Vanilla world is golden. Elevator door is present, as is elevator lift. No 'magical ascension' to the overworld. All looks like it is supposed to.

[ddavies10693]

Alright perfect, keep us posted with your progress. It may be best to test step by step. For example, install and launch from MO with no mods (if possible) and check for errors. Install first mod with MO, check for errors, and then repeat for all the mods that were having issues.

[Chaophim]

The 'fresh start' already helped me nip two possible problems in the bud.

 

First, holding off on MO for right now. Yes, it moved to beta and yes, I <3 MO, but the biggest bugs in the beta bug list are textures and meshes not loading and esp errors, both of which I am already having even with manual installs and NMM. Don't need to compound the problem.

 

Second, I use several F4SE-based mods like Place Everywhere, etc., In doing the fresh start, I figured it was time to try out a new ENB and found that the current vversion of Reshade (required for most, if not all, ENBs) does not play well with the most recent version of F4SE, so the advice I got was to choose one or the other - not both. As I use multiple mods that use F4SE, but only one ENB, the scale seems to be tilted toward skipping the ENB till F4SE and reshade can get along.

 

Also, a few people have narrowed Place Everywhere down to corrupted savegames (i.e. suddenly 'missing content' like the error I have. The author is aware, but can't duplicate the error at this time, so holding back on that mod until a few days or so have passed and more news comes to the forefront. Could be a snowball effect - the Reshade breaks F4SE, which breaks Place Everywhere, which breaks the savegames. We dunno. Testing without it though.

 

Now, got a couple of questions for you, ddavies... Do you use Settlement Keywords and, if so, what flavor? All was fine with the original, IMHO, till he stopped development on it and all the forks took off. I *was* using SKE, but SKI might have some merit to it as well.

 

On a related note, do you use a scrapping mod? I was using Scrap Everything, but Spring Cleaning looks pretty popular too.

 

Just looking for personal opinions before fully committing to standing or changing.