Unknown Vortex Problems

[TarvinDracken]

I'm troubleshooting issues with Skyrim SE mods and hit purge to try to fix some issues. As soon as I do, I get a message that Vortex needs to access [system location] but doesn't have permission to. If your account has admin rights Vortex can try to unlock the file for you. I hit "Give permission" and then keep getting prompted for each and every tiny bit of every file. If that's not enough, I get a prompt from Windows afterwards asking me if I really want to allow the changes to be made.

 

I have no idea what caused this to happen. I can't think of anything I did that might have brought this about and it didn't happen last time I had a round of troubleshooting. You can follow that ordeal in this topic.

 

https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/8399338-skyrim-se-crashing-at-random/&do=findComment&comment=77405448

 

This has been just one problem in a long line if issues of just trying to get mods to work correctly on Vortex ... and no, I'm not trying to do anything other than download and run mods directly from Nexus.

Edited February 24, 2020 by TarvinDracken

[HadToRegister]

Make sure you have UAC turned on in windows
Make sure you're not running Vortex as an administrator
Where do you have Skyrim SE installed?
Where is your mod staging folder located?
If you're using Windows Defender, turn off "Controlled Folder Access"

[Indio21]

TarvinDracken, while you are right this "new" situation of yours does better fit starting a topic here I believe other factors to be involved, mainly you! We just finished up learning, in the other topic, that you do not even possess the knowledge to know how plugins need to work with their mods. I am sorry, but this is the basics!

 

I also am new to the site and modding. The very first day I joined Nexus is when my learning began. Since it has been days of reading, watching videos, and learning what all these veterans of modding took the time to share to open this wonderful world of mods to us. The information is all out there it just takes ambition to learn it instead of figuring everything is handed to you without effort.

 

When you started the other topic you replied back like you knew exactly what you was doing and had all patches and such installed correctly, which was revealed was not the case. Right above where you just started this topic is a whole pinned section on vortex. Have you even opened it to verify you are not wasting good members time, like HadToRegister, to verify it is installed in the correct areas? If you are not posessing the knowledge that plugins need to be active to work properly I am guessing you just installed vortex, some mods you want, and expected it all to work correctly. I explained briefly in the other topic, when I was under a different perception, that this is not how all this works!

 

I realize people sometimes think a person's number of posts is somehow related to knowledge on a subject, so I can understand you wanting, what you consider, a more "valid" explanation. That being said, take only three and a half minutes and watch the intro to this video below. This is the absolute truth on modding!!!!! It is only 3.5 minutes of your time to greatly try to clarify your understanding of the world, again "World", of learning you are trying to venture into.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EKcS7qmtLo

 

If you are not up to this kind of dedicated learning, frustration, unfavorable results, trial and error, and as another veteran modder once said making the pilgrimage journey to Katmandu wait for days to sit with the Shaman god of modding to reach modding enlightenment, then do not start. It will just save you a lot of grey hairs, lol, trust me!

 

Just pick something like the Legacy mod I suggested, its affiliated mod adventures, keep one audio mod, some texture mods, and maybe a weapons and armor mod and call it a day. I really am just trying to be helpful!!! If I am wrong the veterans of the site will correct me. I don't believe anyone who has ventured the journey described above ever wants someone misinformed, but a "handout" is completely different from a "hand-up". Good luck!

[TarvinDracken]

@Hadtoregister UAC is on the default setting, Vortex is not set as an administrator, both the mod staging folder and SkyrimSE are on the same drive, and Controlled Folder Access is presumably disabled. I have a dedicated antivirus program and it seems that has blocked the ability to even look at the status of Controlled Folder Access. I'm looking into whether my antivirus program, which behaves strangely sometimes by locking game exe files in a virus chest, may be the root cause of my current woes. It might not be because it hasn't displayed anything in the virus chest related to Vortex. Whatever the case this has increased the scope of my troubleshooting efforts beyond Vortex itself. I plan to reinstall Vortex and see if that sorts out the issue as permissions would, presumably and hopefully, be reset to default settings.

 

@indiao In my defense, I followed the instructions for each individual mod and had patches for conflicting mods installed even from the start, even though they didn't install correctly or were lost due to other conflicts. I often only have limited amounts of time to troubleshoot as the time left to me at the end of the day to relax is sometimes very short, so I didn't go through every item on the troubleshooting list and say which I did or didn't do but focused on trying the suggestions I hadn't done yet. One odd thing that occurred to me a bit later, is that I might have actually had one too many patches. One patch was the required reconciliation patch and then there was a recomended second patch that seemed to do the job as the other patch, even though it didn't say so in its documentation. I intend to do a bit testing to figure out for sure when I get this more major issue solved. An even more confusing thing that I noticed later on was how the mod load order that I posted from the text file generated by Vortex didn't even match what was displayed within Vortex, meaning not all supposedly active mods and patches were displayed (possibly due to the aforementioned conflict).

 

The plugins being set as disabled, when I never touched anything that would alter what should be the default on state of the plugins page, left me confused. That is why I mentioned it. Doing nothing more than following the normal usage practices of something should not cause such unusual behavior. This left even you a bit stumped as to why Vortex, without any input from me and zero detected conflicts, was ordering some things so strangely. That said, your help, Indio, has been appreciated and your advice is what led me to slim down my mod list and knock out whichever mods were causing the initial conflicts. The only reason I posted on a new topic is because I realized this issue entirely left the scope of the previous topic, not because of a lack of faith in your abilities.

 

I did look through the pinned topics as well as a few searches (albeit in a search engine) and didn't catch any that directly applied to my situation because I couldn't think of the correct terms to use.

[HadToRegister]

@Hadtoregister UAC is on the default setting, Vortex is not set as an administrator, both the mod staging folder and SkyrimSE are on the same drive, and Controlled Folder Access is presumably disabled. I have a dedicated antivirus program and it seems that has blocked the ability to even look at the status of Controlled Folder Access. I'm looking into whether my antivirus program, which behaves strangely sometimes by locking game exe files in a virus chest, may be the root cause of my current woes. It might not be because it hasn't displayed anything in the virus chest related to Vortex. Whatever the case this has increased the scope of my troubleshooting efforts beyond Vortex itself. I plan to reinstall Vortex and see if that sorts out the issue as permissions would, presumably and hopefully, be reset to default settings.

 

 

 

 

I'm betting on that.

 

Sometimes people get so overzealous about security that they end up being their own worst enemies.

 

 

[Indio21]

It is all good TravenD. Like i mentioned I just wanted to make sure you were understanding the world of modding. In the beginning of my adventure I thought I could just be meticulous in picking mods and the corresponding patches, later to have reality come crashing down. Also, every mod I have comes from nexus too, but one, which is Wyrmestooth, and used to be on nexus. Needless to say I definitely see why xedit and conflict resolution is a must with more than a dozen or two of mods now. Almost everything is a conflict and if it is not one that is desired a custom patch is needed.

 

I also have seen what you are talking about with offered patches and now is making sense to me on why one person, I read on, recommended always making your own patches for mods. That is a another whole story.

 

"An even more confusing thing that I noticed later on was how the mod load order that I posted from the text file generated by Vortex didn't even match what was displayed within Vortex, meaning not all supposedly active mods and patches were displayed (possibly due to the aforementioned conflict)." This is because it either only generates the plugin list or it generates two lists, one for each mods and plugins, and stores them in different areas. I have found both but not remembering now if vortex makes one and steam another or something like that. Mods that do not have plugins will not show on the plugins list. That was the other two factors that led me to start tracking it on my own list. Once I seen vortex could not be trusted on its list I started my own and have not been back to look.

 

Might want to check into all what HadToRegister has to say also. I use defender but never had the problems you mentioned. That may have something to do with where you stored vortex and or steam. As I don't have a second SSD I put it all on my C drive but created its own folder there and let the overflow stuff go to my alternate drive to keep the C drive as free as possible. I do not believe that steam, the game, or vortex should be installed in C/Program Files or C/Program Files (x86) as is recommended. I know steam likes to default there if you are using it.

[Indio21]

Hi TravinD, I was just going to send you this in a PM but after rereading it maybe a very basic explanation will help others new to this world. I just wanted to take a minute and clarify some things. I did not want you to think I was attacking you or anything. I was just on a different perception of what you exactly understand with all this. Seemed we went backwards in the last topic starting with errors and ending up at the importance of plugins. It is very hard to gauge one's knowledge of an area through a post if it does not contain enough info.

Really though, I am not puling your leg so to say. My learning into modding has been one big trial of out dated info on processes and such. SSE is my first attempt at modding even though I started playing the ES series in Oblivion for the console.

My guess is that after the Fall Out series happened all the attention went there after the beginning versions of Skyrim started. So from Skyrim LE or VR, also no game historian here lol, everything after faded off. It is why I tried pointing you to up to date resources to learn modding and save you days of research going through out dated info and processes, like I have. It is good for the over all understanding of things but will not get you back to playing faster.

I'll go more in depth on the patches you are seeing here and what I have learned to save the topic space and to not be attacked for not using proper terms. When I read the write up I mentioned on patches, it did not make exact sense until I started learning xedit. I am no expert but will see if I can make some sense of this for you.

Like when I mentioned the handful of mods to get, Legacy etc, I said "and maybe an armor and weapons mod." This is because the added quests offered by Legacy (Oblivion Artifacts, Vigilant, M'rissis Tail of Troubles, The Gray Cowl of Nocturnal, Path of the Revenant, etc, etc, etc) creates places in the museum created by Legacy for the collected artifacts to be displayed and such.

For a hypothetical example, of course some artifacts are going to be weapons and armor. So if you take your Immersive Armors and Weapons and it comes after the Legacy quests they will overwrite Legacy and most likely with blank cells shown in xedit. These blanks cells do not allow the info to pass into the game as the last cell/mod read wins the race.

A mod author would have to spend 1/10th of their time making the mod and 9/10ths time making patches, or including the data as masters to the mod, for every single mod a person, and for every single person modding, could have before it in their LO. This is absolutely unreasonable for them. So the idea with modding is we will come behind ourselves verifying all these conflicts and create the custom patches we will need for mods overwriting others in our LO, or let the conflict exist if it supposed to be there.

Some of these conflicts are so small one may not even notice the game is not performing as directed. As an example with the patches you mention. I have seen where a patch that is supposed to fix compatibility with said mods will leave a cell blank after something simple like a note. Well if that note triggers the quest it will never start as the note cannot appear in the game.

 

I will edit this for clarity. No one who has even the very basic understanding of the function of a patch would do that with a quest trigger. That is not resolving a conflict with a patch it is creating a conflict. I just wanted to show the extremes. Thing to remember getting other people's patches is you get their perception of how they want or think the game should go. So with my example above maybe the person that made the patch was more into the slaying and adventuring of the game than immersion. They may have thought well that is just another pointless note they have to read so excluded it. Which, more power to them. It is their game and patch and our choice to use it or not. Myself, I like the immersion and reading game bs is still more relaxing than tech books, etc so I want it to show. So I will remove the patch and make my own to have it show.

I already have at least 2 to 3 patches I plan to redo because of such mentioned situations. Now do not think I was giving you bad info pushing you to verify the patches offered. If one does not have the knowledge to make these "custom patches" successfully they will just make more problems of different natures. Therefore it is best to use what is offered, and basically works, until one reaches that point of understanding.

Myself, this is the second LO I have put together for a play through. My first was/is half the size of the current I am working on. While it plays flawless now, meaning no CTDs, FPS issues, etc, things that should appear do not or things that should work do not. This is because I did not know conflict resolution is a necessary evil to having a 99% problem free game with mods. As stated before, I and probably most new people to modding, think it is just a matter of selecting good mods with patches available and all will work great, not the true reality when dealing with conflicting mods or large LOs!

 

Think of the game as one big pie. That one pie is the whole world of Skyrim and as anything outside of it would not be a part of it, it has to be on the pie somewhere. If one picks mods that work around each area/piece all is basically fine as that one mod only overwrites that piece. The real problem starts when we try to add more than one layer. Think of each slice as a part of the game. So one slice is for the world of skyrim, another for textures, another audio, one for weapons, one for armor, etc, etc.

 

So if you add only a single mod that overwrites one of those original game pieces, that is a conflict you want. If, like, a second weapons mod overwrites the first which overwrites the game info this may create a conflict you do not want by hiding/not allowing that one great weapon to make it into the game. Or as another I had encountered recently was with Awesome Artifacts, I believe it was. This mod enhanced the powers of another artifact by some percent. Another mod overwrote it in my list setting the powers back to the default the game offered. Because of required LO I cannot move it up or down to resolve the conflict, without creating worse ones, so I am forced to make a custom patch OR loose the affect from the mod. Yeah, I put it on there to get the affect so I was "forced" to learn more on how to resolve it and make the game I wanted, by making a custom patch.

 

If you do not want the learning curve just get a single mod for most areas of the game and with a basic understanding of Vortex, LOOT, Wyre Bash possibly, and LO all should be pretty stable. Hope this helped.

Edited February 25, 2020 by Indiao21

[Indio21]

TravinD, IDK where you plan to take this adventure. If you decided to venture the pilgrimage of mod learning below is a link to a patch I just recently found for AOS and ISC. If you read the description for the patch you will see it relates exactly to what I am talking about above with patches. This person discovered the same comparing AOS and ISC in xedit and decided to make a better one and offer it to us.

 

Now, if you add this patch be aware that it has not received the fame to make it to LOOT's master list. Which will require editing "your" version of the list to keep LOOT performing. I will not go into the directions as I do not know if you will venture this learning or not. Like I had mentioned all the greats left this knowledge for us on the net. Probably so they could go finally enjoy their game, lol.

 

I know I mentioned the write up saying it is better to create your own patches, but I believe that to be the rule if they do not perform to our expectations. Otherwise, I figure why re-invent the wheel! Again, good luck!

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/25051

Edited February 26, 2020 by Indiao21