Crash After Leaving Sewers

[bickieditch]

First, I'm new to Oblivion (a six year old game) but I got it for sale on Steam and finally got my new computer. So I thought I'd try it.

 

Anyway, installed several mods, all of which I know work and seemed to be more or less compatible. Problem is that I keep crashing at the exit of the sewers in the beginning of the game and I still haven't figured out why. I tried it with all mods. Without the race mods. Without the video-based mods (not that they should be a problem), and then only with the most basic level of mods.

 

Now I'm stuck and I'm not sure what to do other than uninstall the entire game and reinstall, starting from scratch. Does anyone know of any solution to this problem that I haven't already tried? Here are a list of the active mods I've tried using. Anything with an * are the ones I've toggled on and off to see if they were the issue, but, as you can see, it's been inconclusive.

 

Francesco's Leveled creatures-items mod

CM Partners mod

*Enhanced water mod (and SI)*

Kvatch Rebuilt

*KT Custom Race Fix*

*Ren Beauty Pack Mod*

Arcane Bank

Tamriel Rebuilt

Thievery in Imperial City

Vaults of Cyrodil

TSS Custom Companion

Hunger & Thirst Mod

Sleep Mod

*Natural Weather, Vegetation, and Habitat mods (whatever pack that was all from)*

Midas Spells

Stirk +Compatibility patch

Companion Vilja

Capes & Cloaks

Armory Lab & Gardening

Dwemer Spectacle

moDem's City Life

Ruin-Tail's Tale

Hunter Mod

Alluring Bottles Mod

Weapon Expansion Pack

Apachii Goddess

Supreme magicka

DarNified UI

HGEC Body Mod

Clocks of Cyrodil

Unofficial Oblivion Patch

Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch

 

(yeah, I know, a lot. I just downloaded anything that sounded interesting/was recommended)

[Striker879]

You are finding out that it takes longer to get a bunch of mods that you install all at once to work than if you installed them one at atime (or in related groups) and test in between.

 

First off, if you running either Windows 7 or Vista you'll be wanting to get Steam and Oblivion installed outside of C:\Program Files (the Microsoft security feature UAC will cause problems once you start running mods). Here's a link to Bben46's Oblivion reinstall procedure. Don't miss the link near the top of the page about moving your Steam install location, and don't skip the registry cleaning step ... it's important.

 

Once you get Steam and Oblivion in something like C:\Games start a new game and go through the tutorial dungeon to the point just before you exit the sewers (you'll see the exit off in the distance). Make a save using the save option from the Esc menu or the console command 'save <SaveGameName>' (without the quote marks and brackets around the name). This save will come in handy if you want to start a new character sometime ... you won't need to redo the entire tutorial. Once you exit the sewers make another save, again using either the Esc menu in a new slot or a named save (avoid the quicksave feature ... it's a known corrupter of save files). This save will come in handy if you want to test mods later.

 

Finally, tweak your game settings and get everything how you'd like it. The game won't really start taxing your system until you exit the sewers and get out in the real gameworld. Go the the Imperial City Market District sometime during daylight hours and make sure your system is handling the load of lots of NPCs in the same cell as your character. A save here can come in handy when you're testing graphics mods that will drag down your performance.

 

Now start adding mods, one at a time at first until you get the hang of it. When your vanilla game stops working and the only thing you've done since it last worked is added JoesCoolMod is pretty easy to know where to start troubleshooting. Start with simple mods, and get in the habit of reading mod descriptions, mod requirements, readmes and mod comments (especially mod comments ... that's where you'll learn what mods to avoid and pick up tips on how to avoid problems installing the mod).

Edited June 12, 2012 by Striker879

[bickieditch]

First, it was already installed in a different folder because I wanted to make use of one of my extra TB harddrives for steam games. (just to clarify that point).

 

Second, I'm on the part of your suggestion where I have uninstalled and reinstalled the game to play vanilla and add the mods in later. The problem is now that I can't even start the game. It crash before it even gets to the Bethesda logo. So I'm not sure where to go from this apparent step backwards.

[Striker879]

Sorry about that ... very few have machines with more than one hard drive, and fewer still change the default install directories.

 

Not sure if you would have already tried this, but often letting the game re-discover your hardware can help. To do that locate your Oblivion.ini file (which will be in Users\[username]\Documents\My Games\Oblivion not the Oblivion_default.ini located in your game's Oblivion folder) and rename it to Oblivionini.old. Start the game and let it load as far as the main menu screen. It will re-discover your hardware and generate a new ini using the Oblivion_default.ini. Often with modern hardware you need to go back into the game menus and get things like your screen resolution set back up (game doesn't do well finding hardware that hadn't even been dreamed of back when the game was released and last patched).

 

If it works you can safely delete your old renamed Oblivionini.old.