less CTDs maybe none

[blacksmithkazuma]

Well I'll give it a try, tried the ENBoost and was getting a lot of Screen tearing. Never used a ENB anything so wasn't going to mess with it. Removed it and did this. Only running 60+ mods but was getting some CTD's. Hoping this will fix it, thanks.

[352]

I hesitate to contradict anyone because I've spent two years or more and thousands of hours, dozens of rebuilds and restarts, trying to get a modded (250+) game stable. I tried all tips in this thread and many, many others. Some tips worked for a while and I often thought "Eureka, I've found it!! The magic bullet to kill CTDs, Infinite Loading Screens, and Freezes", only to find that an hour or so later the bad stuff was back.

 

Seemingly, the larger the save the more adjustments I had to do until finally the game simply became unplayable.

 

This time is different. I've stumbled across the solution(s), and I can take NO credit for any of it; I simply found it, tried it, and darned if it doesn't work.

 

The solutions involve ENBoost from Boris Vorontsov, any (or no) ENB or just the base ENBoost, ini files from EWI (http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/36146/?) --- I personally use the ugrids 5 version with Realvision Performance and change almost nothing in the files (the screen resolution, of course), and probably most importantly, a patch/memory hack to the SKSE loader. You can read about it and obtain an already compiled exe on this forum (look on page 5 for the download link) .... (I'm posting a long breadcrumb link because Boris has a bot trap on direct links)

 

http://enbdev.com/ ---> click on NEWS ---> click on FORUM ---> click on "Other" in the "Advertise Mods" section ---> click on the "Skyrim Memory Patch - fixing ILS, uGrids CTD, freezes" thread

It's very, very geeky for most people (certainly for me) but the post about half way down the 5th page, by ZerOxShadows, contains an explanation and direct link to a complied SKSE patch together with instructions on how to add it to SKSE, including an edit to skse.ini. There are instructions on compiling the patched .exe yourself if you're so inclined; me, I'm all thumbs in that regard. n.b., if you use RealVision, the latest version includes an auto-installer of the SKSE patch, making it very easy.

 

Be sure to READ THE INSTRUCTIONS! It's not hard; if you've modded your game, cleaned it, run BOSS, TesVEdit, and the like then you can certainly do these simple things.

 

What's the result? For me, with an i7 2600k running at 4.6ghz with 16g of memory, Windows 7 Ultimate and a GTX 780 with 6 gigs of video memory after installation I have played the game for the past ten hours with only ONE CTD, and that leaving Windhelm at the doors as the game loads Tamriel. I have three followers active, three heavily scripted followers in the game, and all the normal texture, armor, and other eye candy mods (253 total). Before installation I would have had several dozen CTDs at many places as I played those ten hours. The game is butter smooth and almost rock stable; it's fair to say my game is now "vanilla stable". No more adjustments of the Papyrus timings, no more tweaking of memory sizes, just smooth game play with no more CTDs {like probably all of you reading this thread, the modded game's instability was driving me crazy!)

 

I couldn't be happier, and I hope this post points others to this solution. The first post in the thread on the ENB forum I linked to above describes my modding experiences prior to applying this patch (or solution(s), really) *exactly*.

 

Hope this helps someone.

[dubhorizon]

It's so easy to overdo it with mods that no CTD is a thing of legends,... or vanilla players. 99% of ini tweaks are harmful but readily availlable with a simple google search and that's a main reason. You must learn about how much your pc can handle in this particular game and master it to be able to play it as it is intended. Anything can cause a CTD, from papyrus not having enough time to process everything we throw at it, to the graphics card, already overclocked to a fying pan, not being able to handle the 200 2k hd trees with the smim meshes being loaded in ultra long distances and ultra high definition bodies and extra npcs spawning left and right with wet and cold telling each and evey one of them to wear rain gear and frostfall telling them to breathe cold air and have ice on the clothes while enhanced blood making them bleed and have wounds and dual seathe redux telling them to dual wield stuff and realistic needs scaning your hunger and fatique while headtracking scanning for npcs to look at while....Even I get tired. Imagine what happens to a game engine originally made to handle none of that, then beefed up with steroid patches to handle some of it. So don't use all of those together. Also incompatibilties clearly stated in the mod pages that after 8 - 10 hours into moding the game you were too exhausted to read, to accidentally moving one file where it shouldn't be. In my experience you must specify what you want out of your skyrim modded experience. First of all you should not touch the ini files unless you know what you're doing and don't download any ini files online. Only thing you can tamper with in there is the ones explicitely needed by well known and updated, suppoted mods and "fPostLoadUpdateTimeMS=" which you should increase to give papyrus more time to handle scripts in loading times. Secondly about the textures. Download 2k if you have a gtx 7 or amd equivalent series with 2gb of memory, if not 1k is more than enough. Don't overdo it with trees and grass. Optimise them all with an optimiser tool, make mipmaps, downgrade everything to 1 or 2K etc etc. If you want to use an enb, realvision performance is awesome for most computers (and has a lot of useful info on his page too) and I even add depth of field without problems. Now a very importand part: choose your experience. You want an immersive harsh skyrim with pain, hardship and combat to be your experience (my personal favourite), put climates of tamriel, Wet and cold, frostfall, enhanced blood, realistic travel and equiping overhaul and maybe immersive animations, immersive armors, cloaks of skyrim, immersive weapons, deadly dragons and stop there. Don't add more npc's, spawn camps, battles, extra spells etc etc. If you want a more player friendly skyrim with lot of lore and story add climates of tamriel, realistic travel and interesting npcs, inconsequencial npcs, books of skyrim and anything else you might want to add (always in moderation!). always optimize their textures it really helps. Use mod organizer to have all the above, meaning you can add mods in a seperate folder which leaves your skyrim folder clean and you don't have to start all over again if you mess up. Download it, open it in one side of your screen open youtube on the other side of the screen and watch his tutorial video and do what he does and you will know almost everything about it in 20 minutes. Also about pirated Skyrim. If you made it this far down, after modding a pirated version of Skyrim, it is time to go buy the game. I have, for experiments sake, modded both my legal steam version of skyrim and played extensively and then uninstalled it and played with a cracked copy from online with the exact same mods and I can assure you the pirated copy is going to crash more, some mods will work poorly and maybe not at all and you will have no help from anyone. The game bundle with all availlable content (legendary edition) is very cheap at the moment in steam. If you're going to go to all that trouble to mod your skyrim (hours of modding and testing) you will never have stability if you don't have the legal version of the game. Now there are good ways to test your Skyrim before you actually play the main story (bummer I know). After choosing one of the above cominations of mods, download a mod that makes another beginning (skips the main intro with the cart), do not enable any mod that need enabling yet and as soon as you're outside in the world of skyrim press ~ to open the console window, type player.setav speedmult 700 and tgm now you can run uber fast. Now run uber fast to any major city. While doing that look around frantically. when you're outside the city use the console command and spawn: 5 Alduins, 5 master vampires, 5 fagravens and 10 sweetrolls and stand there basking at the apocalypse you just spawned. Any CTD? Stutters? NO? Go inside the city and spawn 15 of each of the above. wait till the whole city is a mess. All good? Good, your graphics card will take anything skyrim can throw at it. Start a new game with or without the new beginning mod, enjoy. If you see that you get no CTD in 3-4 hours now, you are probably good to go.

Edited January 30, 2014 by dubhorizon

[352]

This Skyrim Stability Guide (http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50244/?) is new and presents some interesting thoughts. It is largely consistent with my personal experiences, although I rely upon the .ini files offered by Ewi.

 

I'm trying some of the basic suggestions in the SSG and so far my experience has been positive. One thing I've noticed is that, in a new or fairly new game, most tweaks work fine. As the game progresses and the save files get larger, however, the weaknesses inherent in most tweaks show themselves, normally in ugly (read, CTD and freeze) ways.

[dubhorizon]

The Skyrim Stability Guide is awesome and a must read for everyone thinking to start modding their Skyrim (or already have done so and found CTDs are way too many).

Edited February 1, 2014 by dubhorizon