good idea to clean mods not explicitly dirty?

[phillipjohnmc]

what i mean is, should we clean mods in which, for example, LOOT doesn't say there are dirty references? i clean the master files because LOOT (and everyone else) says to. but i wonder if i should clean some other mods which i suspect might be causing ctds like amazing follower tweaks, convenient horses, war zones, OBIS...not saying they have problems, but maybe i should clean them anyway?

 

maybe it's a good idea to run/clean all your mods through xedit, just to be sure? or maybe that's pointless. in other words, if LOOT's not giving you a warning, there's no point in doing this.

[WastelandAssassin]

my two cents on the matter , and this could be used in almost all discussions about mods : ask the mod author . the people behind a mod will almost always know best about their mod , so they should be asked such questions specifically

and you could of course look through the comments on the mod's page , especially with more popular mods , you can almost count on the fact that people have already asked such questions

as for cleaning mods with no reported dirty edits , aside from what I already said , I don't think cleaning these is really necessary (not sure if this could cause issues , I honestly doubt that it could , but I haven't tried it)

but I would wait to hear from more experienced modders just to be sure

[phillipjohnmc]

well, i have ctds now and again, and it's so hard to know what's causing it. i've cleaned masters and switched off the windows handwriting service, but with almost 200 mods, which didn't cause a problem until i had lvled up to about 20 or so, it's seemingly impossible to sort. i thought maybe i should just go through and clean every mod, but if there isn't a warning, then like you say, probably not necessary. in my experience in reading description pages, i don't recall seeing much info about cleaning, other than a mod author saying 'cleaned with xedit', which is enough i suppose. i do see in LOOT a sort of waterdrop mark saying it's confirmed cleaned by xedit, but only 3-4 have that mark.

[WastelandAssassin]

I really doubt this is related to cleaning mods

there are so many possible reasons for crashes , and some of these could take a while to appear

if you want to try to figure out the issues , please make a post with a full report (as much detail as possible , your full load order , anything else you think might be related or useful information)

if troubleshooting crashes would have been this easy , no one would suffer any problems with the game.......

[phillipjohnmc]

very true about troubleshooting.

 

well one thing i realised was that i had verified my game cache and forgot to reclean the masters. so i did that, which might have been the cause of recent crashing

[Vrakyas]

I clean (nearly) every mod with SSEEdit when it hasn't been done by the author already. But I keep a backup of the original file, just in case it caused issues.

I also re-save it to form version 44 in CK64 if it is still form version 43.

I test the mod afterwards as far as possible, before cleaning/editing the next mod.

 

But often CTDs are not caused by dirty esp files or dirty edits, but by faulty meshes or textures.

Or like my last case: I got a CTD everytime I tried to enter the new CC Tundra homestead. This was caused by a faulty install of a texture mod with NMM. NMM creates symlinks to the files it installs and one symlink was 0 bytes in size. After copying the correct file, I could enter Tundra homestead.

[phillipjohnmc]

i have noticed a difference after cleaning the masters, in the past i mean. and so far today and yesterday, since recleaning them, i haven't had any ctds. i notice it ctds when i've got 3 followers on horses (i use aft and ch). might just be too much for the system. on foot it doesn't happen often i don't think. i'll have a freeze during a big battle every once in a while. anyway, i just thought maybe cleaning other mods might help but i'm getting the impression that it's not going to matter

[Algabar]

Just my 2 cents: Cleaning mods, that aren't marked as "dirty" by LOOT is in the best case a waste of time. In the worst case (rather unlikely) you might damage the mod and its functionality. If a mod has "dirty edits" or other problems according to LOOT, it's always a good idea to check this mod's description and comments page. In some cases, "dirty edits" are intentional and shouldn't be cleaned.

 

OFC, cleaning the master files is still recommended, so is checking the version number in the file header of a mod and resaving it, if necessary. Other that that, I wouldn't clean anything.

[sopmac45]

well, i have ctds now and again, and it's so hard to know what's causing it. i've cleaned masters and switched off the windows handwriting service, but with almost 200 mods, which didn't cause a problem until i had lvled up to about 20 or so, it's seemingly impossible to sort. i thought maybe i should just go through and clean every mod, but if there isn't a warning, then like you say, probably not necessary. in my experience in reading description pages, i don't recall seeing much info about cleaning, other than a mod author saying 'cleaned with xedit', which is enough i suppose. i do see in LOOT a sort of waterdrop mark saying it's confirmed cleaned by xedit, but only 3-4 have that mark.

 

I do not think we need to clean mods, except for the master files. In regard to CTD's, I can tell you, based on my own experience that there are several things that can trigger a CTD.

 

Recently, I was having a lot of CTD's and in order for me to find out what was the cause of the problem, I went nuke, reinstalled the game from fresh and I started to download / install mod by mod while trying out. After I got our of Helgen, I saved my game. Installed the first, used to console command to get all the marks in my map and I traveled to different places and especially, to places that I was having CTD in my previous game. To make the story short, after I installed More Bandits Camps, I started to CTD where I was not before.

 

I understand that for you to do that, will be very hard to do because you have 200 mods in your load order but sometimes, things like this must be done to determine what is the cause of our CTD's. I reported to the mod author my finding and there are a lot of users of this mod, reporting the same thing, so definitely the mod is dirty and it must be fixed by the mod author and most likely the problem is related to meshes / textures.

 

So that mod is not longer in my load order and since then, my game is running fine. For me was kind of easy to find out because I had only 87 mods. On my current game, I am only running 67. Yes, I am not using other mods that in practical terms, will not my game more fun but probably will conflict to other mods and I am trying to focus only on having combat / spawning mods.

[phillipjohnmc]

interesting. i do have more bandit camps. i'll look into that...