What is DEFAULT.esp?

[Oermtuhz]

I was working in Skyrim's Creation Kit on building a cell when it crashed. When I started it back up, it states it is creating a "DEFAULT.esp" and upon attempting to load data gives the error:

 

Assert:

File: ..\TES Shared\misc\BGSLocalizedString.cpp

Line: 2871

LOCALIZATION: Error opening or reading strings file.

 

Abort/Retry/Ignore

 

All options close/crash the Creation Kit. Retry and Ignore give a warning that Dragonborn's strings file is missing first.

 

I am very confused.

[MFitz56]

You evidently hadn't named the mod you were working on or didn't set it as the active file. You should be able to go to Skyrim/Data and find and delete DEFAULT.esp. That should end your problem.

 

As always, if you're afraid of fouling something up don't delete the file just move it somewhere else (like downloads) until you've tested my advice. That way, if I'm wrong, you can always restore it.

[Oermtuhz]

Thank you for the reply.

 

The notification that it is creating the .esp happens as soon as I open Creation Kit. Upon further testing it seems that the CK always has this mod active, and TES5 Edit shows it to be empty with no masters.

 

I should note that this is happening after a pure vanilla reinstall. My only mods are a few edited Global Values (Timescale, Killmove) and some hand-merged records in separate mods. Disabling these seem to have no effect.

 

The only other modification I can think of is Beth.ini, but it had seemed stable previously and wasn't deleted.

 

- Edit:

A clean install seems to have fixed it, but I still have no idea what happened. I'm keeping the borked files if there is any tests someone more familiar with Skyrim the CK are interested.

Edited December 28, 2019 by Oermtuhz