Disabling Region Borders makes the game randomly crash when exploring world space

[Zapulous]

I had around 150 mods installed with mod organizer and when playing the game I noticed that the game would sometimes randomly crash after about 5 - 20 minutes of playtime when exploring the cyrodiil world space.

 

I managed to solve this issue by removing mods that disable Region Borders in the game.

 

Testing Procedure:

 

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I managed to find a way to repeat the crash so I could test it. I would set my speed and athletics to 254, fill my pockets with skooma and fly around cyrodiil until the game crashes. The game would crash every time after around 5 to 20 minutes before it would run out of memory.

 

I disabled all my mods and OBSE plugins and the game would not crash anymore, and would instead run out of memory.

 

I enabled my OBSE plugins and the game would not crash.

 

I started enabling my mods one by one and the game would not crash until I enabled OOO.

After enabling OOO the problem would resurface, so I removed it. without OOO the game is stable, so assumed the problem was caused by a broken mesh being spawned by a custom npc or creature.

 

Then I installed MOO and the game would start crashing again randomly. I disabled all custom spawns in MOO and the problem persisted. Then I disabled all of the features in MOO - and the problem was gone!

 

I figured the crash had something to do with the world itself, and the only thing MOO and OOO share in common is that they both disable region borders.

 

So I set MOO.ini_borderregions to 1 (borders are enabled) and the game would not crash anymore.

 

I installed the rest of my mods and I am happy to say the problem is gone.

 

 

 

I decided to repeat my findings on my laptop thinking that it might be something to do with mod organizer or my PC.

 

With clean install the game was very stable (as stable as oblivion can be). The moment I installed MOO and its requirements the game would start to randomly crash because border regions were disabled.

 

I spent around 60 hours testing this and I believe my tests are very conclusive.

 

 

 

 

When flying around cyrodiil the game does still sometimes randomly crash, but it is extremely rare compared to crashes caused by disabling region borders.

 

I do not know if disabling region borders in the oblivion.ini will cause the same issues. I did some brief tests and to my surprise I did not notice a difference. It is possible that the issues with OOO and others could be solved by disabling borders through the oblivion.ini.

 

 

I am sharing this so that it might help others fix issues in their game and that more experienced users may confirm or debunk my findings.