Islands in the sky

[anjenthedog]

So.... Occasionally, when I'm "in the field" near to Bleakwood Basin, my game will go a bit wonky.

In no particular order...

• save is disabled in the MCM
• a chunk of earth with a stump, a section of rock, a skeleton (embedded in the rock..inside the stump) with a small patch of grass above it all, will be floating several hundred "meters" in the air, almost centered over the giant's camp.
• the game gets sluggish (if it's still responding, console shows large lagtimer values to those script events which are echoed to console)
• eventually the framerate slows to a crawl and I ctd. I don't think I've successfully gotten away yet.
• I've encountered this since I first began playing
• probably 100 times so far over the course of the past ~year
• the console can become unresponsive (it still opens, but it doesn't respond when commands are issued)
• sometimes, it's also accompanied by a loss of TCL, which cannot be remedied via console and was not initiated by console.
• And... Not directly associated with being near to Bleakwood basin, but I use Go To Bed, and I've woken up sometimes viewing the world from the sky. On a few occasions, I've not only "woken" in the sky, but also have seen that island, and in those cases, shifting to first person or otherwise out of what is apparently cinema view or something, gameplay has crashed shortly after, although normally if I'm sleeping and "wake" in the sky, a pov shift results in me back into my bed safe and sound.
• Sometimes there's just a doorway up in the sky.
• oh, one other. Back when I was still riding horses, a couple of times when I encountered the "gravity bug" I ended up on that island escaping being killed on horseback, although I have no idea where it came from or why I was able to leap to it from the horse as it flew higher and higher.

 

Does that ring a bell to anyone, and if so, do you have any idea why? Is this some Bethesda joke or easter eggy thing?

 

Although I added other things to that bullet list I think are related symptoms, the really weird part to me is that floating island. It's always the same floating island, in the same place.

 

edited for content and spelling

[JimmyRJump]

Never had a floating island anywhere, but the console tends to lose the functionality of TCL pretty easy. Sometimes right after starting the game you hit tcl and enter and nothing gets added in console, just the 'tcl' appears with no indication of it being active and of course after closing the console your character can't move through objects. I've even had it happen that it worked when activating TCL but worked no longer when wanting to deactivate it. Had to reboot the game to be able to play on solid ground again. So, the loss of the TCL function isn't related to floating stuff but the game's engine getting capricious.

 

Sometimes people start floating about when you have too many NPCs in the same shot. Maybe the same thing happens when having too many objects in a certain area? Also never heard of Bleakwood. You mean Bleakwind?

 

Here's someone who had a house floating above Bleakwind Basin. And a topic about it on Reddit and one on Gamefaqs.

[Moksha8088]

For me, not being able to use TLC usually means that I have entered one too many commands ahead of it, like player.additem, resurrect, FOV, etc... Don't like this happening when I am stuck since it means exiting and restarting the game.

[anjenthedog]

Never had a floating island anywhere, but the console tends to lose the functionality of TCL pretty easy. Sometimes right after starting the game you hit tcl and enter and nothing gets added in console, just the 'tcl' appears with no indication of it being active and of course after closing the console your character can't move through objects. I've even had it happen that it worked when activating TCL but worked no longer when wanting to deactivate it. Had to reboot the game to be able to play on solid ground again. So, the loss of the TCL function isn't related to floating stuff but the game's engine getting capricious.

 

Sometimes people start floating about when you have too many NPCs in the same shot. Maybe the same thing happens when having too many objects in a certain area? Also never heard of Bleakwood. You mean Bleakwind?

 

Here's someone who had a house floating above Bleakwind Basin. And a topic about it on Reddit and one on Gamefaqs.

 

Yep, I've seen the same behavior from console re: TCL (and others). I suspect that (for whatever reason), the scripting engine gets "broken" during game load (when console commands don't work upon game load) or during some event like a battle, etc (when the problems crop up later in a game session). With respect to the first, funny thing is, reloading the same save that resulted in broken play "last time" it was loaded can result in normal play, ie no problem. This suggests the scripting engine is being compromised on game load, by something other than the save file itself.

 

Anyway, back to islands... Thanks for those links. I now know (or at least presume) the issue to be one of missing item/resource references. Weird thing is though, that these islands (or this island anyway) aren't always there... (in contrary to the idea that they should *always be there, as might be suggested by the posts that state it's caused by a mod that breaks the references) They appear randomly, without any mod changes that might change the landscape, usually after I've been out in the field for a long while. And in most cases, it's that same chunk of tree trunk, rock, skeleton, and grassy rock plateau that appears. (looks as if a chunk of one of the river basin areas with those overlapping puddles of grass, was simply yanked out and thrown into the sky.)

[anjenthedog]

For me, not being able to use TLC usually means that I have entered one too many commands ahead of it, like player.additem, resurrect, FOV, etc... Don't like this happening when I am stuck since it means exiting and restarting the game.

 

 

In my case, that's not the issue. I rarely use console, except for TLC very occasionally, and TG more regularly but still pretty infrequently.

[JimmyRJump]

I use 'TFC 1' (Toggle Free Camera with time and environment freezing, except for floating water and trees moving in the wind) and 'TM' (Toggle Menu) quite a lot for screenshots and never had those commands broken. Only TLC gets the finger pretty often.

[anjenthedog]

Well... I get semi-regular failures of TFC, or at least regularly (although not frequently), when returning to "normal mode", I lose control of zoom and pan, so technically it's not TFC but whatever gets reset when returning from it...although I don't use TFC from console, I use a hotkey provided by some UI mod (not sure which one at this point tbh). Those are usually solvable by using a crafting station or similar forced animation sequence (although for some reason, not the one associated with Go To Bed).

 

Sometimes, nothing from console does anything. I can't even snag a piece of firewood by issuing a player.additem, or change a setting like player.setvar carryweight) Console opens, but it doens't respond...I suspect that's script lockup.

 

I updated NetscriptFramework within the past week, as well as FNIS, so perhaps that'll help... idk. (in fact, I installed them exactly because of this issue, as the last time it was really annoying)

 

I'm actually eager to encounter the bug again, so I can try disabling the various components of the island and see if that solves the issue finally.

[c0ax599]

You mean stuff like this??

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I just noticed the floor tile leaves a shadow on the ground too... Um, I had installed a Castle type house mod near here just to check it out, and that was when I first noticed the lamp and a floor tile with a tree stump on it at that time. I thought it was from that mod. I uninstalled the mod, and only later noticed the items were still up in the air albeit a little different.. And yes, this is basically right above Bleak Falls Basin.

 

TBH, I've just continued playing and didn't give it a second thought until I saw this post. It's a minor annoyance for me. Not sure what your's looks like. Sorry, I know that wasn't much help. I only got about <80 mods installed, and i wouldn't think it could be any of those.. I guess we'll see if anyone else has some ideas..

Edited March 3, 2020 by c0ax599

[anjenthedog]

I don't have an image to share, (along with other symptoms of impending CTD, I have yet to be able to save an image when it's visible), but suffice it to say it's a bit like a small section of the wax-puddle-like formations around rivers, perhaps as wide as 3 or four bodies stacked lengthwise (up top anyway..smaller below). First time I saw it, I'd barely even started playing the game and had perhaps a couple dozen mods installed, mostly things to remedy the crashes I experienced early on, so not terrain replacers, player homes, etc... (Correction. I'd installed a waterview player home located half way down the lake from Rifken by then, but afaik,. that's it in terms of added/edited topography.)

 

As I noted in the original post, it's a small round area of grass with a buried tree trunk (invisible from the grassy area) and some rock beneath and inside that, along with part of a skeleton embedded between seams of the rock, like someone carved out a plug of ground and deposited in the sky.

 

But yes, in general, it's something "like" what you show in your example.

 

From what I've read elsewhere, those artifacts should be marked for deletion when you encounter them.