All Mods Affecting Spawns Cause Game Instability

[Sarcasm]

HI there, I'm having a fairly cataclysmic issue with Skyrim. I'm going to describe it and its symptoms in as much detail as possible, so this will be a read.

 

Specs:

CPU i5 2500K

GPU Geforce GTX570

RAM 16GB

 

It seems any mod that affects enemies spawning causes huge game instability for me. Anything that adds new enemy spawns or increases spawns (Monster Wars, WARZONES, ASIS, Deadly Dragons) seems to make my game freeze and crash at random. Usually, I'll just be walking around the wilderness and the game freezes. Sometimes, the game will instantly crash when I press ESC to open the menu. Most of the time when I do freeze or crash, any saved game that I made in the vicinity of the crash will be unloadable - the game will just hang at the loading screen and never load the game. Most of the time, deactivating one or all of the above mods will make the save game loadable. At first I thought the saved games were being corrupted, but clearly it's just something with one of these mods that is interfering with the game's ability to load the game.

 

I've been experiencing this for weeks now, and I've experimented with turning mods off and on. The only common feature I can see is that the mods which cause crashes and freezes are the ones that add or edit the way enemies spawn.

 

Some areas of the world are more problem-prone than others. The Reach is mostly clear of freezes. Most of Whiterun, Winterhold, and the area around Windhelm aren't too bad either. But the area around Falkreath, Riverwood, Dawnstar, and pretty much all of the the Rift are almost completely unnavigable with freezes every few feet. Most saved games created in these areas are not loadable. The area around Dragonbridge is completely offlimits - completely. I cannot go near the town without a freeze, and any save game created anywhere even near Dragonbridge will be unloadable. Monster Wars creates a couple battles here, and disabling it allows me to enter and save in Dragonbridge just fine. The WARZONES mod is completely unusuable, every battle freezes every time without fail. This is odd since I ran the mod for a long, long time without any issues at all.

 

I can see some signs of game instability which indicate the game is about to crash or freeze. The most telling example is that the sound made when equipping spells to a hand will lag out and be delayed, and sometimes the lighting particle effect of a spell being equipped in my hand will not appear. If either of these things happen, the game is about to freeze and pressing ESC to open the menu invariably crashes the game.

 

These freezes and crashes are almost entirely outdoors. I can count the number of times it's happened indoors on one hand, but it has happened.

 

I've been told repeatedly it's my computer, not the game and not the mods. My computer is clearly far above the specs required to run these mods, and I know that because up until a couple months ago, I was able to run Warzones, ASIS, and DeadlyDragons just fine. This whole thing started when I tried Monster Wars for the first time. I installed it, and everything went to hell. But even a complete reinstall of the game and deleting and redownloading all mods did not fix this issue. What computer issues could be causing this? I was having power supply problems a few months ago, and replaced it a month or two ago. I can't imagine that could have changed much. Could hard drive damage cause this? Or...something?

 

If you read all this, you are a good soul! Any help would be immensely appreciated. As of now, Skyrim is very frustrating to play.

[Sarcasm]

Any ideas? Should this be in the troubleshooting forum?

[IsharaMeradin]

You may have done some of this already, but you never know it might help

 

1. defrag your hard drives especially after reinstalling the game & all those mods or after doing any large amounts of data writing/erasing

 

2. make sure all the mods are up to date as well as the game being fully patched up

 

3. double check the documentation for each mod, sometimes what worked with one version will no longer work with a newer version

 

4. use BOSS to assist in getting the correct load order. Manually place what it doesn't according to the mod's directions. If it doesn't have any directions leave it at the bottom to be safe.

 

5. use Wyre Bash to merge leveled lists and to check integrity of save games as compared to your mod list.

 

6. clean your computer. if you don't need it on your hard drive (especially the drive with Windows) remove it. if it is important, back it up somewhere else. if it isn't important and you don't want it, trash it. more space means larger swap file for Windows to utilize. every little bit in processing power can help.

 

7. if you haven't consider starting a brand new game and testing out each of the problem areas. It is still possible that your save files got messed up somehow.

 

8. try saving and reloading different types of saves in the affected area. perhaps manual saves will work where quick and/or auto saves won't.

 

9. if you've got anything running in the background that might try to run at the same time, disable it while you play. Its possible that whatever is in the background might interfere with the game.

 

10. try temporarily running the game with lower graphics, perhaps there is too much happening for even your card to render.

 

11. I don't know about power supply but if you didn't replace it with one that was at least the same rating as the one previous, then there may not be enough power for all the components to fully function.

 

12. Seek additional help cause after all those I wouldn't know what to do.

[Sarcasm]

Thanks for the suggestions. I did try most of these, but for some reason when I use BOSS, when I load up WryeBash it tells me a couple times that there are load order errors and it has corrected them. Not sure what that is about. I didn't think to defrag though, that's a good idea. My harddrive's a mess, so I think I might just reformat tomorrow and start over with a new Windows install. If this problem persists, I'll be back!

[IsharaMeradin]

yeah Wrye Bash will complain about load order after BOSS corrects it. This is cause BOSS changes the order of the plugins, but not the load order numbers in Wrye Bash's internal list. Therefore it complains but re-assigns the correct numbers based on the new order by BOSS. In fact any time you manually change load order in Wrye Bash and switch to another tab it will complain when you go back to the mod tab.

[Sarcasm]

Okay, so reformatting my hard drive did not do anything at all. The game still freezes, and save games becomes unloadable. The game is not worth playing like this, what can I do about it?

[Sarcasm]

Without running ASIS, MonsterWars, or WARZONES, I have not had any freezes or broken saves at all yet. So it definitely seems to be related to increased or new spawns. Still, I'd like to get at least one of them working since the game is pretty empty without them.

 

If anyone's had a similar issue or knows what could be causing this, do feel free to speak!

[darkmatter97]

hey sarcasm if your still having these problems, have u tried not running wars in skyrim with ASIS because having both on at the same time is a bad thing, they're incompatible with each other try it ;p

[lwxonkele]

same problem,SkyrimMoreSpawns and ASIS's increase spawns function cause freeze,when i changed location.

 

So i deactive SkyrimMoreSpawns and ASIS's increase spawns function,the game is just fine

[SkyrimeisterSam]

Warzones is a horrendous mod and should be taken off the Nexus because it's basically a virus for Skyrim, it hasn't been updated in over a year and the moment you run a save with it loaded, it slowly begins to poison your game.

 

Anyway, check your RAM usage using Skyrim Performance Monitor, I have a feeling you're reaching the inevitable 3.1GB limit where every man and his dog crashes at, regardless of the hardware you're running, especially since you're running so many mods that add stuff to the game.

Edited July 13, 2013 by SkyrimeisterSam