Can I find out what mod causes my game to crash?

[Deleted11019528User]

Ok so my problem is that it chrashes before the main menu right when you see the imperial dragon thing

[TroyReurge]

Sometimes when i really am dedicated to find out what is messing with my Skyrim, I see if anybody has experienced the same issue.
And if they did, I'd also make sure that they had their mod load order posted.
I then compare mine to said list to see if we share any of the same mods.
After doing so I disable each mod the Poster and I share.

 

-You can disable individually or all at once but it is preferred individually if you'd like to keep some of the mods listed.

 

Then if everything goes well...

zWOOP

 

(Skyrim fixed)

[DeliciousNoob]

Ok so my problem is that it chrashes before the main menu right when you see the imperial dragon thing

I am also having this problem. Does anyone know of a solution?

[MrStoob]

 

Ok so my problem is that it chrashes before the main menu right when you see the imperial dragon thing

I am also having this problem. Does anyone know of a solution?

 

You have a mod that is dependent on another mod. In NMM, it should appear as orange or red in the plug-ins list. Orange if the required mod is present but inactive, Red if it's missing entirely. De-activating the offending esp should do the trick.

Edited February 21, 2018 by MrStoob

[SAWsilvers89]

I know this forum is pretty much dead at this point but for anyone that may still be interested i would also recommend LOOT. It pretty much works the same way as BOSS but is more geared towards skyrim. Sometimes just having it reorder your mods can fix all your problems. It will also notify you of any mod incompatibilitys or missing requirements/masters and mods that may need to be cleaned using TES5edit while providing guidelines for that as well

[SAWsilvers89]

I would also recommend to enable logging in your Skyrim.ini . For this you go into my games under my documents, skyrim, and open the skyrim file. Its the one with the gear next to it and not be confused with Skyrim Prefs, thats something different. It will open in notepad and scrolling down you'll find a section labled "[Papyrus]" and in this section 3 things. bEnableLogging=0 , bEnableTrace=0 , and bLoadDebugInformation=0. Set those values to 1. This enables a log that should appear in your Skyrim folder under my documents so the next time you run your game and it crashes you can go back to read this log and it should help point a finger directly at whats causing your problem at the bottom of this log.

[cruxermine]

Okay, I understand your pain, I've been there myself. It really has taken me days sometimes to sort things out. Some of the things I say will probably sound really obvious, but I'm going to include them just in case. You never know.

 

The first thing everyone seems to recommend is to verify your steam cache. This is on the off-chance that an integral game file has gotten corrupted.

Secondly, with many mods it is wise to defragment your hard drive (unless it's solid state in which case, don't!), because large bsa archives may have become fragmented, and even many loose files may have become scattered around your hard disk, increasing load times, and possibly even making your CPU unable to find and retrieve them in time for the game load.

 

If you can remember what the last couple of mods you installed before these crashes began occurring, it might be possible to narrow it down to one of them.

Get BOSS or Wrye Bash to reorganise your load order, and scrutinise the result to see if there are simply incompatibilities which cause crashes.

 

Go to C:\Users\[uSER]\AppData\Local\Skyrim and open plugins.txt. Search for duplicate entries, particularly of Skyrim.esm. This used to happen on occasion, and can cause issues in-game. You'll need to enable The "view hidden files and folders" option on your machine. I don't know where plugins.txt is located on a mac.

 

What are your specs? Terrain and water tiles disappearing are often a sign that you've run out of VRAM. This is especially true if you have many high resolution textures installed. I myself found I can't run the game properly with W.A.T.E.R. installed, at any resolution. You can use Optimizer Textures (link) or SMCO (link) to optimize your textures. SMCO can also optimize meshes and bsa archives, but can also cause problems such as missing meshes, so be wary. Optimizer Textures is slower, but much simpler to use and has never caused problems.

Speaking of specs, try lowering the game settings, you may be attempting to run Skyrim at a higher setup than your machine can handle.

 

Start a new game after doing all this, as save files contain a list of all mods installed at their creation and running the game with a different mod list often can cause problems.

 

If none of this works, try the following procedure I devised, which minimizes the time needed to test all mods individually. First of all though, back up your data folder. I believe that you can preserve your original load order since the latest release of NMM allows for multiple load orders. I haven't tried using it though, but if it works, all the better.

 

• Say you have 100 mods total. (This is for simplicity, the real number of your mods is completely arbitrary).
• They are arranged in a certain order in NMM, which helps. Install the first half of them, ie 50 for the example.
• Start the game and see if you encounter problems. If you do, then the culprit is one of these 50 mods. If you don't, then the culprit is one of the other 50 mods you didn't install.
• Uninstall the mods again.
• You now have 50 suspect mods, in a nice list.
• Install the first half of these 50, ie the first 25.
• Once again, start the game and see if you encounter problems. If you do, the culprit is one of these 25. If not, it's one of the other 25.
• Repeat this process, cutting down on mods by a factor of two, until you are left with two mods. You can now easily test to see which one is the culprit.

Using this procedure, you cut out possible mods 50% at a time. While it may seem cumbersome, mathematically it will save you time.

 

Of course, this procedure relies on you being happy that all your mods are compatible with each other, which is why you must organise using BOSS/ Wry Bash first and testing.

 

I do hope some of this will help. This is a link to a site which contains solutions to some crashes/ freezes/ steam errors/ audio problems/ fps/ other general bugs which commonly occur in Skyrim also.

 

Good luck, and I hope this helps you out. If not, the only other thing I can really suggest without knowing more is that you look for a pattern in the crashes.

Ask yourself:

• Do the crashes occur in a particular area only?
• Do the crashes occur after a particular amount of time?
• Do the crashes occur in time with a particular event? Ie, do the crashes occur when it begins to rain/ snow, or when a particular npc/ kind of npc starts talking/ interacting with the environment?
• Do the crashes occur only when around a particular thing? Such as a forge, group of trees, river/ other water body, or anything else?
• Are the crashes sudden and with no explained error, more like a quit-to-desktop than like a crash?
• Is an error message given, such as BEX or AppHangB1?
• Do the crashes happen only when a new cell loads, such as when running down the road from Riverwood to Whiterun?
• Do the crashes happen when a cell loads (such as in the line above) if I am looking at the ground?

Heh, you can tell I spend a lot of time doing this, probably more than I spend actually playing the game itself! Anyway, good luck, and please let me know how you get on. If any of this helps, let me know what part it was which helped.

 

If none of this helps, you need to give more information. Post your specs, Skyrim.ini, SkyrimPrefs.ini and load order (as attachments or spoilers if you can, to cut down on the size of the post) and maybe more efficient/ accurate help can be given. Because of the magnitude of different setups, and of mods, it is difficult to given an all-encompassing answer without tailoring it with specificity.

 

Hey! I'm not sure if you're still active, and i know this was posted years ago, though i seem to have a couple problems personally. I recently made a modlist (i use vortex) and it seems that everything works just perfectly fine, my frames are okay, they only dropped a couple times when it was installing stuff in-game, but that's it.

i have a couple problems that you mentioned, my crashes are more sudden, like the game just exits and goes to the desktop, and it's at random intervals. there's no real time limit to them. I've uninstalled a handful of mods i don't really feel like i genuinely need, and thought might also affect gameplay, and tested by going to certain areas where i think things might conflict with each other, however they seem to be fine. I can give you my modlist, my specs are modernized, (GEFORCE GTX, INTEL CORE I7 9th Gen for example is a couple things i got)

though if you could help me, i'd really appreciate it! i'll keep trying throwing around mods and starting new games as to not screw up the save, as replaying a save with removing or adding mods repeatedly can mess it up.