SSE Player Home is TOO Persistent!

[Taffer42]

I have installed a player home (Snow Shack - https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/8739), that has exhibited some odd behaviour.

 

There is an NPC in the home. If I kill her, then load a saved game (either the same one or on a different character completely), she will no longer be in the house. Sometimes she disappears even when I don't kill her.

 

The items in the house are likewise persistent across saves. If I take something, then load a saved game, the item I took is generally missing. (Sometimes everything is fine the first "reload", but if I don't do anything and just reload again, the items are missing then. It's bizarre.)

 

Only exiting the game seems to "reset" things to how they should be. But then the behaviour starts anew.

 

I have found that if I make the NPC persistent, she behaves as expected. I assume making the items in the house persistent also will fix their behaviour as well, but I'm pretty sure that's not the answer. I see lots of items in the game that behave properly that are not persistent.

 

Is there maybe a location setting that needs to be turned on to prevent this behaviour?

Edited September 29, 2018 by Taffer42

[JonathanOstrus]

This sounds like an engine bug I came across myself recently. I found some weeks back dealing with start enabled quests and aliases. If you load up a save with a newly added quest is fills the alias. But if you reload a save where the quest hasn't been seen, the aliases fail to fill. Reloading additional times doesn't work. Only closing the game and reloading from scratch fixes it. Affected manual saves, quick saves, and auto saves.

 

So the behavior you have seen, requiring a complete restart of the game, is a similar symptom and frankly there's nothing you can do about it short of the full game restart as you've found.

 

I suspect it's all related to the shortcuts the devs take to enable faster loading of saves without having to reset the entire game world and reload things. Their "state" reset routines are broken. An exploit related to this is to force store and npc personal inventory resets by attacking an npc (not killing) and then quick reloading.

[Taffer42]

Not trying to contradict you here, but I'm relatively new to modding (a couple months) and trying to learn all I can. If what you suggest is the case, have you any idea why setting the NPC to persistent seemed to "fix" her?

[JonathanOstrus]

Specifically I can't say as I have a clue why that works. Most likely due to the way the engine handles persistent references internally being very different. So the save reloads will act differently because of the reference being "temporary" vs "persistent".

[cdcooley]

You have simply discovered in a very visible way the main source of "save game corruption" people frequently blame (incorrectly) on quicksaves or autosaves.

 

Any time you've been playing the game then drop to the menu to load a save game (or use quickload) you will end up with a game that is a merge of the state of the game you were playing and the contents of the save you load. That's almost always a bad thing unless nothing of real importance has changed. One example where it's frequently OK is the automatic game reload when you die. And the reason that one is mostly safe is because it's usually going back to the last autosave made as you were moving between cells. When the autosave is made everything interesting about the cell you are leaving gets recorded in the save file and nothing about the new cell gets processed. So if the autoload is loading an autosave the game starts in the new cell but only has to process it like it does any other time you move between locations.

 

There are two types of things that get messed up in the process of reloading.

 

1. Anything that changes as you play but can't be recorded in the save files.

 

2. Anything you changed while playing that can be saved but isn't in the save file you're loading over top of the currently running game.

 

The core problem is that the game tries to save time by only reloading things in the current cell that it things might have changed and its list is very, very incomplete.

 

The reason setting that NPC to persistent is fixing the problem is that by being persistent her record is forced into the save file even before her cell is loaded he very first time. So when you reload the game she gets reset based on what was saved in that save file. When you reload without her being persistent she's one of the things the game sees is already loaded and doesn't bother reloading from the original game data.

 

To avoid those problems you should always quit to the desktop and completely restart the game when you want to load a saved game. People have blamed "save game corruption" on quicksaves and autosaves for years, but the real problem is "quickload" and any thing else that loads one game on top of another.

[JonathanOstrus]

@cdcooley good info. I never put 2 and 2 together but that all makes perfect sense. I'll have to keep my own personal save/reload in check.

[Taffer42]

Thank you very much for that info, cdcooley! I had no idea! Definitely good information to have. Funny I never noticed this before.

 

I've heard some heavily modded games can take upwards of 2 minutes to start, but if it saves your saved game, it's probably definitely worth it.