Acceptable Save Game Bloat with heavy mods + Settlements?

[Sacremas]

I've been running a heavy modded Fallout 4 game with a lot of settlement building (inclduing Sim Settlements) and new quest mods (Fusion City, Tales of the Commonwealth, etc), and I noticed that suddenly I was constantly freezing on autosaves, be it fast travel or just exiting the pip-boy. I checked my save games folder and noticed that my save was currently around 40 MB.

 

Unfortunately I had been using almost exclusively quick, auto and exit saves and the last hard save I had was Fort Hagen just before confronting Kellogg on level 15 (at this point the save game was 21 MB), where in my game I level 51 (with a 50 % xp reduction mod) and built 10+ new settlements since then and cleared 50+ locations, so I have little progression growth of saves to look at between those spots, not to mention I added a few extra mods between then to fix isses I ran into.

 

I first started getting these freezes in Vault 88, hadn't noticed them at all before then with the game going more or less flawless with 3-4 hour play sessions before then, but unfortunately due to a mess up on my part I don't have a auto save from before then other than said Fort Hagen save to compare to either, nor did I think of to look at the save game size at that point...

 

I am mostly just wondering what the normal "acceptable" save game bloat with Fallout 4 is considered to be, if 40 MB on a relatively advanced game likely means a dead game and I should start over with a different load order, or if it was just the good old autosave issue rearing its head and I should get a save game manager?

 

Thanks for any replies.

Edited February 19, 2018 by Sacremas

[Rhoops]

My 'normal' was full game re-install with a new SSD drive when the bloat got to 21 mb. I'm playing in a similar style to your description, excepting Sim Settlements. With about 90 settlement/clothing mods generally. The main problem I had was with the now deleted (Nexus) mod that added water pipes and irrigation, which effectively killed the loading times to unuseability. Hence the SSD.

I'm at 22 mb saves at present, and the loading times are from 6-10 seconds to 40 seconds, or endless loading failures about 10% of the time. This is a lot better with the SSD, but by no means good.

My CPU/Graphics are about 5 years old, just starting an update, so I assume to get to 40mb saves and still functioning on the way, I guess your system must be more recent and more efficient.

 

This is my third playthrough, and the first was without mods and I got to the end. I seriously doubt I'm going to repeat that with mods. Just too many problems along the way, and the game isn't engaging enough to overcome that.

 

Vault 88 ? Freezing.... is that where you can't walk at more than crawl speed, especially when having to follow that kid? I got that first play through...NO MODS or save bloat. Just Bethesda.

[Sacremas]

Yeah I'm on a Samsung Black SSD, with a i7-6700k processor and a GTX 980 with 16 GB RAM, so even with 241 active plugins and 566 installed mods I don't expect to run into too much freezes. Before this started and I got endless loading times suddenly I was playing flawlessly 3-4 hour sessions, however I ran into an issue that forced me to change my load order a little and uninstall some mods mid game (yeah I know you really shouldn't do that, but generally these were "harmless" non-scripted mods). I just wasn't sure if that or the 40 MB save was what was causing my crashes, as I'd really prefer not to lose my character and progress.

 

Vault 88 I meant the Vault-tec Workshop DLC, it happened as I was clearing out the radioactive caves with the scorpions and swapping in and out of build mode to remove the uranium. That started freezing over and over again forcing me to shut the game down and load it before starting that section.