The ever frustrating "ctd on save" bug

[cmaesing]

Awrite, gents. After playing Skyrim (later Legendary, now SE) for some years, I recently thought I'd go for a final playthrough before allowing it to retire for good.

 

While I would not call myself an IT or technology expert, I have been modding the heck out of the different Skyrim versions for some time - and of course also this time. Used the Nordic Guide as "guidance" for an install. And even with a heavy mod list of 250 esps and 200 esls/eslified esps, the game is stable (an un-reproducable ctd every few hours ... a blackface that can be fixed via CK, but that is pretty much it). Installation time of about two weeks paid off here.

 

That said, I started encountering the absolutely frustrating "ctd on save" bug. Having spent hours of searching and reading the past two days, I think I have tried pretty much all fixes which are being discussed or recommended as viable:

• Fix savegame with ReSaver. This actually helped me earlier in my playthrough with the same issue - but interestingly enough, all my current savegames do NOT show any issues here - so nothing to fix for ReSaver.
• The player.kill solution.
• The coc qasmoke/pcb solution.
• Disabling and unchecking (from plugin list) iNeed.
• Adjusting the Papyrus section in skyrim.ini to iMinMemoryPageSize=1024 and iMaxMemoryPageSize=3072. This actually helped earlier in my playthrough with the same issue - but the issue keeps coming back (values are still set as stated here).
• Moved most except for a handful of savegames into a separate folder, to have a short list of savegames.

My current playthrough is about 50h into the game, the latest savegame (ess-file) size is at 17 mb. I can successfully save an older savegame (went back to a very early one, say 5h of gameplay). But I haven't tried to find where the cutoff is. The latest one I tried is 15h of playthrough back - and still results in the ctd.

 

A final word on the save behaviour: When I load my latest savegame and try to (hard or quick) save, the game starts the actual save process. It does not immediately ctd. The ctd happens about 10-15 seconds into the save procedure. After the ctd, I will then find the skse-file properly created. It seems the issue is with creation of the ess-file: Here I only see an ess.tmp file with 0 mb file size.

 

Am on 1.5.62 with SKSE64 2.0.12. Deliberately haven't updated yet, as I have too many mods relying on these versions (and I am afraid to break something unnecessarily).

 

Thanks for any insight!

[BlueGunk]

I was replying with the player kill routine but I see you've tried it. Hmm - sorry.

 

Have you checked your spare free space capacity? I gather to build the save game Skyrim uses a fair bit of space up.

 

Sorry, no other insights.

[cmaesing]

Thanks for your reply, BlueGunk. I did give it a try, but to no avail.

 

Free space also isn't an issue - have a couple of 100 GBs left on my hd.

 

I have left it for now out of frustration - and might return in a few days. My guess is I have to go back to whichever save is not corrupt. Praying it's not too many hours back into gameplay.

Will revert here if I ever get it resolved.

[COMBATFUN]

Are you using DynDoLOD?

I had your problem last year and solved it by deactivating DynDoLOD, starting the game, save, exit, enable dyndolod, run loot, start game, load newest safe, wait for dyndolod sucessfully initialized message.

Than i was able to save again without CTD and could continue the game.

Are you really sure, that none of your installed mods are for the new skyrim/skse versions? Before deleting/uninstalling the game, i would make a backup and than try to update.

Edited April 6, 2019 by COMBATFUN