Mods that affect Heartwood Mill area

[Skinjack]

OK. I'll load it and maybe disable my Settlements Expanded and patches to see if I can get it working. Really want that mod in-game, though.

 

EDIT: Well I disabled all my Settlements Expanded mods and the patches, updated Obsidian-True Storms as mentioned, and it still crashes in the Sarethi Farm/Heartwood Mill area. I'm not seeing anything else that affects the area, except maybe Hammet's Dungeon, but I don't think they are in the right area. Any ideas? How do you load all the mods in SSEEdit and run for conflicts? Or can it tell? I hate to restart the game after I customized a lot of mods. Probably why I'm only level 2. Should be out killing things.

Edited October 26, 2019 by Skinjack

[Skinjack]

Another one that affects it is Farmhouse Chimneys. It has an MCM menu to add towns, like Arthmoors and Settlements Expanded, but I have it checked. Might need to take Aurora Village out of a merge since its in there too, but I don't recall it causing any issues. Plus that is in a different area. Sorry, this is more for mental notes right now because my memory is #*?$ poor and the possibility it might help someone else so they don't have to retrace all my steps.

 

So far I have identified an area stretching from around Autumnwood Dragon Mound to Faldar's Tooth to Heartwood Mill to Treva River to Sarethi Farm and back to Autumnwood. Shor's Stone and Bereshal Gove don't CTD on me, so its got to be a problem somewhere in that area. Hopefully someone can identify what I am not seeing.

Edited October 26, 2019 by Skinjack

[HadToRegister]

 

Sorry, this is more for mental notes right now because my memory is #*?$ poor and the possibility it might help someone else so they don't have to retrace all my steps.

 

 

 

 

 

No worries, it's always appreciated by everybody when someone documents how they're troubleshooting and fixing things through posting.

Every little bit helps

 

everything is better than a

 

"Never mind, fixed it"

[Skinjack]

OK, after a little more research and crashing, I've found a CTD zone about like this:

https://imgur.com/qE2m1uH

 

I'm ok at Bereshal Grove, Shor's Stone, Surplus Goods (south), Darkwater Pass, Rift Watchtower (north), Boulderfall Cave, Goldenclaw Estate (east), Shadowgrim Barrow (west), and Treasure Hunter's Camp.

I'm NOT ok when I fast travel to Stumped, Autumnwood Dragon Mound, Sarethi Farm, Faldar's Tooth, Heartwood Mill, Treva's River, Altar in the Woods, Darklight Tower, Avanchnzel, Angarvunde, Largashbur, and Treva's Watch.

 

My issue seems to be centered around Heartwood Mill or north west of it. Any ideas based on my list what could be causing the issue? I've already disabled things like Farmhouse Chimneys and Settlements Expanded and their patches but so far I'm still getting some sort of interference in there making me CTD.

 

EDIT: Oh yeah, also tried adjusting the resolution from Ultra down to Medium and that didn't work either. (sorry, missed Darklight Tower when circling at the bottom right).

Edited October 26, 2019 by Skinjack

[HadToRegister]

I'm going to guess a bad .nif that those areas have in common?

 

Just had an idea.
Are you comfortable/familiar with using SSEedit?

If so, open up your load order in SSEEdit (Although I don't know if it can handle more than 254 esps)
And start looking for conflicts SPECIFIC to the areas you listed

[Skinjack]

I actually ran Settlements Expanded for conflicts after watching a tutorial on how to identify conflicts in SSESedit. But that's about as far as I got because I don't know what that specific area is listed as. The only things I could really find for that area were Farmhouse Chimneys and Settlements Expanded, plus their patches (Medieval Lanterns, Shor's Stone, etc) but I didn't see anything I could identify as wrong. I'm not anywhere near an expert on SSEEdit. I can run a few scripts to identify esl plugins, check for errors, etc., but woefully inadequate on conflict resolution.

 

Could I run Cathedral Assets Optimizer on the whole meshes folder in Data to fix them? Or would that fubar something? The only mod I know I haven't saved in the CK that I ported from LE is TAVE Whiterun Exterior.

[HadToRegister]

Not sure, I was hoping you'd be able to find something each of those areas had in common with each other to be causing a CTD.

There MUST be something a mod is using, that is specific to those areas, and not the other areas, that is causing the CTD.

Worse comes to worse, you'll have to disable a landscape mod, or water mod, or lighting mod etc to see which one will eventually turn up as being the culprit, and with your extensive mod list, that's going to be a PITA

But I would definitely start with landscape, water, lighting, housing etc

One at a time, and not necessarily in that order, just go with whatever is giving the 'feel' that it might be the one causing the CTDs in those specific areas.

[Skinjack]

Yeah, I thought this was going to come down to "turn half off, check, do again..." etc. From what I've been reading online it could also be a spawning issue in that area. Maybe OBIS, or one of the dragon mods I have. I don't have a lot of mods that actually spawn things. Could even be Convenient Horses. That's been giving me a problem lately. Maybe I'll just copy the meshes folder to a different drive and then try CAO on it. Safety first.

 

If anyone else has any ideas I'd be grateful.

 

I'm going to quit for the night. This is giving me a headache. Maybe I'll print out my list. I always have better luck finding problems when its on paper.

 

EDIT: OK, now I'm just bored. How exactly do you find conflicts in SSEEdit for a specific area as above? Got time to mess with this for a while since the wife is baking a cake now and I'm apparently no longer of use to her.

Edited October 26, 2019 by Skinjack

[Skinjack]

So I made a copy of my meshes folder and backed it up, then ran CAO on my entire meshes folder. This is what I got:

 

2019-10-26 19:40:12 [iNFO] Listing files and directories...
2019-10-26 19:40:17 [iNFO] Beginning...
2019-10-26 19:41:53 [iNFO] H:/STEAM/steamapps/common/Skyrim Special Edition/Data/Meshes/architecture/farmhouse/fern01.nif would be optimized due to necessary optimization
2019-10-26 19:41:53 [iNFO] H:/STEAM/steamapps/common/Skyrim Special Edition/Data/Meshes/architecture/farmhouse/fern02.nif would be optimized due to necessary optimization
2019-10-26 19:43:14 [iNFO] H:/STEAM/steamapps/common/Skyrim Special Edition/Data/Meshes/weapons/Orcish/1stPersonOrcishbow.nif would be optimized due to necessary optimization
2019-10-26 19:43:14 [iNFO] H:/STEAM/steamapps/common/Skyrim Special Edition/Data/Meshes/Xzax/weapons/Cross/cross06.nif would be optimized due to necessary optimization
2019-10-26 19:43:17 [iNFO] Process completed

 

Are any of those meshes, like the fern, limited to that area? I only did a dry run. Should I commit and run it?

 

EDIT: Got impatient and tried it. Didn't make a difference with crashing in that area, but Whiterun seemed awful empty (i.e. 3 guards), but that could have been because it was at night. No door guards, though.

Edited October 27, 2019 by Skinjack

[Skinjack]

Woohoo!!!! Fixed it.!!!!

 

So for future reference to those that have problems with CTD's in the Heartwood Mill area (had to get all the words in there for future searchers) I was doing as HadToRegister suggested by reading through the posts of my landscape mods so I could begin disabling them one at a time if they affected that area. On Wooden Bridges I saw that it needed to be after Darkwater Crossing or it caused landscape issues. This same mod also affects other areas, like Heartwood Mill, etc, presumably with navmeshes. I had Wooden Bridges in a merge that was holding the 66 spot in my load order while Darkwater Crossing was 164. Exactly the opposite of where they were supposed to be. So I disabled the merge mod and separately enabled the mods that comprised it. After sorting, Darkwater Crossing was now 96 and Wooden Bridges came after it in the 9D slot. This worked. I could get into Heartwood Mill, Sarethi Farm, and Darkwater Crossing looked good at the bridge. Haven't tried all the rest of the locations yet, but I have a feeling they will now work.

 

I think I'm going to see what I can do now about getting rid of most of my merges. Wrye Bash seems to be working as it should now (so far) by not using load order slots for light mods like most patches. I just crossed the 254 threshold with them both and it hasn't crashed my game yet.

 

Dumb luck that I spotted this as quickly as I did, but reading the posts of the mods definitely helped identify this issue. HadToRegister, I thank you very much. I don't think I would have found this without your suggestion and I would now be contemplating the very arduous task of starting my load order over again. You are a lifesaver.

 

EDIT: Oooh, now I can try out this LE Gifts of the Outsider conversion to see if it works.

EDIT 2: Yay! Got it working too.

Edited October 27, 2019 by Skinjack