I *thought* I knew what a "clean save" was....

[Vashra1]

Then I read this thread, and now I'm all confused:

https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/4bt2a4/what_is_a_clean_save/


So...

Which is it?

There are at least 5 different definitions for a "clean save" there.

Like...I have this .ess (as opposed to skse) that I made just as you get sent to the block in Helgan (barely after all the race pick stuff) - I made it on a fresh install of the game, where all I had done modwise was clean the masters and do the bethini stuff. I hadn't even installed SKSE yet. Does that count as a "clean" save?

[Rasikko]

When testing a mod, or trouble shooting another save that is being affected by a mod, a clean save is a save that has not seen the mod, that is, a save that contains no information of that mod baked into it, because it was not installed AND saved onto it. This is ideal for testing mods.

 

This is not to be confused with a save that has no mods installed, like a brand new install, or a new character with no mods activated on the save. I'd call that a Fresh save, in order to prevent confusion between the two.

Edited May 21, 2018 by Rasikko

[Vashra1]

When testing a mod, or trouble shooting another save that is being affected by a mod, a clean save is a save that has not seen the mod, that is, a save that contains no information of that mod baked into it, because it was not installed AND saved onto it. This is ideal for testing mods.

 

This is not to be confused with a save that has no mods installed, like a brand new install, or a new character with no mods activated on the save. I'd call that a Fresh save, in order to prevent confusion between the two.

Thank you, that seems a wise distinction.

 

So, by your description, any save I made, no matter how "late" in the game I made it, that was on an install with no mods active is a "fresh" save?

 

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I'm overcautious enough that I've always only ever loaded up a new mod for testing onto a save fresh out of the Helgan tutorial that I saved back before I'd installed ANY mods (or even skse64). AFTER that works (with any prerequired things like SKSE or SkyUI etc) without explosion, I'll load that mod up on my already modded save...which is probably *filthy* AF because I *just* learned that mods can be "dirty" hehehe.

[tomomi1922]

 

When testing a mod, or trouble shooting another save that is being affected by a mod, a clean save is a save that has not seen the mod, that is, a save that contains no information of that mod baked into it, because it was not installed AND saved onto it. This is ideal for testing mods.

 

This is not to be confused with a save that has no mods installed, like a brand new install, or a new character with no mods activated on the save. I'd call that a Fresh save, in order to prevent confusion between the two.

 

Thank you, that seems a wise distinction.

So, by your description, any save I made, no matter how "late" in the game I made it, that was on an install with no mods active is a "fresh" save?

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I'm overcautious enough that I've always only ever loaded up a new mod for testing onto a save fresh out of the Helgan tutorial that I saved back before I'd installed ANY mods (or even skse64). AFTER that works (with any prerequired things like SKSE or SkyUI etc) without explosion, I'll load that mod up on my already modded save...which is probably *filthy* AF because I *just* learned that mods can be "dirty" hehehe.

I would caution you right there. This is not literature, history, nor linguistic study. So “by definition” carries very little weight because ... technically you can call it whatever you like. But the “definition” hear is simply for clarification and communication.

 

Rashiko clearly established he meaning of a clean save, and a fresh save. But you need to remember why we bother with this at the first place: practice of safe, “responsible”, and defensive modding so our games don’t go boom. Therefore, a fresh save should be somewhere at the beginning, likely after Helgen. Or at least after we get uncuffed and gain free control. That is my definition of a precise fresh save.

 

My justification: the intro cut scene introduces a lot of scripted scenes that are never seen again in game, or at least not in that manner (limited control of actions, first person only camera). There are a few mods even clearly state we should activate said mods after Helgen because he execution scene may freeze the game. I personally experience a lot of weirdness with Unique Character at the execution scene.

 

On top of it, the further we progress in game, the further data is written into the save. Most mods are designed with the presumption we start a new game. Like a hypothetical Solitude quest mod, it would presume we never set foot in Solitude before. This is how it would be designed. Then creators will figure out different use cases where players install mods in various states of Solitude exploration, and make a catch function to handle those. But the possibility for creators to catch and handle all scenario is a lot lower and make for a lot less stable approach than playing from a fresh save. Therefore, it’s risky to assume a well progressed save is a fresh save.

 

Just be very grateful that Skyrim SE is probably the most stable Skyrim build thus far in Skyrim history. My frustration is at minimum right now.

[Vashra1]

Sorry if I sounded too literal.

I just learned two days ago that mods "bake" things into saves whether what they put in there turns out to "corrupt" the save or not.
I'm trying to understand what "injection" is, because apparently it can be rather bad.

I've discovered that there's more to resolving mod conflicts than changing load order, and now that I have TESEdit up and working, I'm sitting here staring at a BUNCH of mods with red text and red background. I initially thought all I had to do was let LOOT pick the load order. Now I apparently have quite the mess to fix. A kind person put me onto some tutorials by Dirty Weasel on youtube, so there's *some* hope lol.

It sounds like my instinct to just start over with the "fresh out of Helgan, no mods installed" save was at least on the right track.

[tomomi1922]

Sorry if I sounded too literal.

 

I just learned two days ago that mods "bake" things into saves whether what they put in there turns out to "corrupt" the save or not.

I'm trying to understand what "injection" is, because apparently it can be rather bad.

 

I've discovered that there's more to resolving mod conflicts than changing load order, and now that I have TESEdit up and working, I'm sitting here staring at a BUNCH of mods with red text and red background. I initially thought all I had to do was let LOOT pick the load order. Now I apparently have quite the mess to fix. A kind person put me onto some tutorials by Dirty Weasel on youtube, so there's *some* hope lol.

 

It sounds like my instinct to just start over with the "fresh out of Helgan, no mods installed" save was at least on the right track.

Bethesda may prefer its customers to be typical casual players who only like to turn on the game and play. I refrain from saying "dumb and illiterate customers" because we too can be carefree playing with most games without having to learn so much about the internal software structure of the game itself. But this is a theoretical debate. The reality is much simpler: Do you want to play Skyrim with or without mods? If yes, are you committing to learn modding? So if you are here, you probably have answered Yes on both. It is like a hobbyist car mechanic, you are not professional, but you still have to know a lot about tinkering your car.

 

- I highly recommend AGAINST doing anything with TESEdit unless you absolutely know what you are doing. It's literately a bomb, one wrong move and it blows up in your face, CTD. Besides, most mod authors are very competent. They are way more qualified at tweaking their own mods than us. TESEdit is the complete last resort (and did I mention risky?)

 

- Regarding "baking into the save": look at it this way, the game has to have a way to store data, right? From your current quest progress, equipment, skill and level, to your setting + preference from a mod. Some mods leave very tiny and harmless footprints while others store complex data. And it depends on how good and careful the mod creator is, certain data gets left behind as garbage when not properly cleaned. Some creators are less experienced than others. They may not always think of a scenario where players want to uninstall a mod and fail to create an exit strategy. When the mod is gone, the weird/complex data left behind the save may get interpreted wrongly by the game or another mod. You see where this is going? Very large mods, most creators simply state "its impossible to uninstall, your current save will very likely corrupt upon mod uninstallation".

 

- LOOT is not your miracle worker by any mean. LOOT only tries to solve 1 thing: Load order, without any guarantee of 100% success. Load order is like a complex instruction from your boss telling you how to setup a very expensive machine: you must press this first to get into this mode, then enter 213 to get into that mode, if green light comes on, you must enter current date, then press the big red button, wait 5 seconds until you see a beep ... A few mistakes will probably cause a lot of problems. And since mods are collective efforts of so many people with so many different backgrounds, experience, skill, ethics (work ethics), mods get extremely unpredictable.

 

- There are a million other reasons your game will crash. My game has had CTD recently (every single time I load a save). I narrowed down to using the wrong "skeleton". Skeleton (not the undead you see in game) is the bone structure of a certain character. A skeleton is a collection of nodes, think of them like joints and mounting points. Mounting point is where character would mount a weapon. Each node has a unique ID. A "wrong" skeleton is a skeleton where it is missing certain node ID or nodes not setup correctly. The game tries and tries and eventually crash for ... literately spin off its math calculation to some unrecoverable points, to put it in plain English. Like a puzzle, if you try to snap 2 pieces together and they don't lock, you have a problem. And how did I get the "right" skeleton? I had to install 5 mods each offer its own skeleton. I have no idea what the skeletons look like (about some thousand nodes, I am not going to read). Eventually I kept uninstalling and reinstalling, having different skeletons and other files overwritting each other. Fortunately, after quite a lot of reading on forums too, I found a harmonious combination.

 

If I get into the story telling mode, I can tell you more about all my nasty "encounters" in the past with modding Bethesda games that some may take days to figure out or find a working solution with some compromises, and some of them are just "pure luck" that suddenly worked, and I would have no idea how to replicate that setup.

 

So what can you do? Just start reading, solving problems. The more you know, the better you are at making choices. Oh, you also need to develop "an eye" for certain mods. The way the mod creators write description, present the mod, give instructions, respond to comments and bugs, and along with their track records of mods, you can have an idea how solid/experienced they are. Reading the comment sections also help a lot. Some advanced users would warn others of potential problems. It's like reading Yelp for comments before going to a restaurant.

 

And last but not least, backup your save files. So what if you are going to take a chance on certain mods (like a DLC sized mod). Go and play with it, test it. But if at some point you find problems or just finding the mod not to your liking, then delete all the saves with that mod installed, go back to the earlier save before you installed the mod. And business as usual.

 

Hope these rather broad advice help.

 

 

 

Edited May 24, 2018 by tomomi1922

[Vashra1]

It was very helpful thank you.

I don't know where I classify as a user. I'm not really into creating things from scratch, but I do like to customize things.

I've got 200 hours listed on Steam for "playing" Skyrim. Most of the time I've been logged in, it was to mess around with or test a mod. I've never actually completed the game.....in fact, thus far, other than traveling around and "seeing" things, I've never gotten a character to the point of being able to get to the top of the Throat of the World!

This is largely because I've been trying to mod the game to make it playable for my daughter, who has some visual needs. The vast majority of the blur/dof/etc effects made the game unplayable for her, and changing the *colors* in the game took more work than anything else. Once I got "into" modding for her, it just sort of captured my interest, largely because I'd find this mod or that mod while looking at some other mod....few of them do *exactly* what I'd like, so I figure I want to learn to make my own.

TSE5Edit isn't a bomb till you start actually *changing* things.

Still...some things, like cleaning the master files, really do need to be done, and having looked at the code, I can see some of WHY.

To just go in and look at stuff, it's quite the resource and I've learned a lot.
I've also destroyed 3 saves and had to reinstall Skyrim twice from mucking around, but I learned a lot :)

Using it to make a minor esp - say..one that does nothing but change the viewed name of a gold coin to "Septim" for the sake of immersion...isn't hard.
I've got a movement mod in the works that I need to test, but I *think* I did everything right thus far...I'll see what creation kit has to say about it...later.
Thus far I've found that pesky creation kit to be less intuitive than just staring at the scripts in TSE5Edit.
Using TSE5Edit to write up something like Dawn of Skyrim? Yeah...I can't even imagine that. You'd at the very least need CK or something like CK to render the visual bits, I assume.

This will either hold my interest and I'll end up "really" writing mods (not just modding my game with other people's mods), or not. We'll see :)

[tomomi1922]

I fall in the same boat: I am not into mod creation, but I am not a dumb user who don't play with mods or click to download mods and just pray they will work, refusing to learn more. I did complete the game once many years ago. But the last month (since I came back to Skyrim) I haven't got to even the Thalmore Embassy in story line. Literately just got to learn the shouts.

I still really think you should not mess with creation kit or TES5Edit. Things like changing texture doesn't require modding, just texture replacement. And frankly, there is a mod for that. Just tinkering with existing mod is hard and time consuming enough. I personally would rather spend my time learning things benefiting my career. Mod creation for Skyrim is fun, but essentially all the knowledge is narrowed to Skyrim and Bethesda's game engine. Even Fallout 4 is quite different (or different enough to have to relearn a lot of things).

Hmmm, your daughter? Does this mean you do not need to worry about nudity and sex/adult mods? But did you explore CBBE? Misconception about CBBE is a kinky big boob mod. But it is far from it. It is a tool to let players configure body shape (only for female right now, can be for male in Fallout 4). They have the never nude option (like Vanilla, naked body has underwear). You can style the body shape to be as realistic, close to real life, least sexy as you want. It is what I am having now: no ridiculous big boobs, skinny NPCs are flat chested. You should look into it. Good news, you don't need to mess with .esp for CBBE.

[Vashra1]

Modding the game for her meant making *drastic* changes to colors and lighting and scale and so on so that she could visually process the images. She has some severe limitations in that area. For my own playing, it sounds like CBBE could be an interesting mod. I'd love to get some more realistic looking characters, though, being a happily married woman, I'd probably keep them clothed ;-)

[tomomi1922]

Modding the game for her meant making *drastic* changes to colors and lighting and scale and so on so that she could visually process the images. She has some severe limitations in that area. For my own playing, it sounds like CBBE could be an interesting mod. I'd love to get some more realistic looking characters, though, being a happily married woman, I'd probably keep them clothed ;-)

CBBE is only a system. The choice is completely yours. It is ever more so true with a single player RPG type game. Just don't buy into the ongoing misconception that CBBE is either "plastic surgery" or "gigantic boobs". It is just a tool and certain players can use this tool to ... placate their own fantasy. Like saying money is evil because people use money to buy drugs or guns.

 

Regarding color and lighting changes that you need, you should really look into a good ENB. I am currently using Photorealistic ENB (PRT for short). The default setting is very nice. But I am into that ENB because of the wide range of adjustments I can do in color and lighting in the game. It is also non-destructive. No matter what you do in ENB, it will not crash your game.