A request for help: I'm out of ideas to fix my CTD's!

[OJLMethos]

Update for those interested:

 

I took my first proper delve into xEdit conflict resolution and spent the entire of yesterday reading the xEdit tome and working through the conflicts in my Load Order...

 

1. I think literally every mod had a red conflict somewhere in it and so I started having a look at random ones to just get a feel for what they are, what were conflicts etc etc. Interestingly i found it was very similar to MO conflict flag system, the vast majority of red errors were where patches / fixes had overwritten something as intended and looked completely benign. Naturally it goes deeper in detail than MO and you can select exactly which over-writes you want to keep. I need to look at the Groups system properly as that seems to be the key to ignoring all the false positive / benign / accepted overwrites and conflicts.

 

2. As there were literally over 62,000 records in the list, I decided that going through each one would be a bit long winded - so I started to look at an automated merged patch (which is no longer supported in xEdit, and directed me to Wyre Bash). So I made a Bashed patch and then had a look at that in xEdit because I was aware that automated processes aren't as good as manual ones. For the most part it did a good job but did have some "errors" where unpatched data was overwriting a patch I wanted to keep. I fixed this and made some further enhancements where I thought necessary leaving me with my own merged patch.

 

3. Through this process I didn't uncover anything that I believed would cause any kind of CTD. The majority of the conflicts were very superficial such as RND and COCO competing over what attributes to give when eating / drinking. Though this was just looking at conflicts made by the Bashed Patch and so maybe its scope doesn't cover the important juicy stuff.

 

4. Next I looked at any "critical conflicts" highlighted by xEdit and to my surprise, all of them were benign false-positives. Things such as Frostfall and Cloaks of Skyrim having different hexidecimal colours in fields that were (according to the mod authors) literally not used. I changed them anyway to get rid of the pink flag.

 

I think the next step is to start going through the records 1 by 1 as I dont believe I saw anything that would cause the game to crash in the above, so while I may have my RnD food giving me the correct, merged properties now - I literally didn't even know it wasn't to begin with - so I feel I have not fixed much.

Edited March 8, 2020 by OJLMethos

[OJLMethos]

edit: accidental double post

Edited March 8, 2020 by OJLMethos

[Indio21]

Here, read this intro to merged patches....

 

Merged Patch

"The simplest patch to make is the TES5edit merged patch. This patch can merge some types of conflicts in ingestible (food and potions), ammunition, armor, container (like merchant chests), faction, ingredient, magic effect, miscellaneous item, NPC, and weapon records. It cannot do all types of conflicts in all of those records. It can also handle leveled item and leveled npc forms, but generally it doesn't do a very good job of this. The merged patch will automatically read any mod you have loaded into TES5edit when you run it. It determines whether those mods change any of the things it is capable of patching and combine those changes into a new esp, which will have those mods as masters.

It is NOT to be confused with merging plugins."

The TES5edit merged patch is best for simple changes. It's especially useful if you have multiple mods that add keywords to objects. It can't really do much past that.

 

 

My take is it is designed for patching and not "intuition" on CR. Look at this one too....

 

Patching is not an excuse for shitty load order.

"If you are using any automated tool to patch, it will not give good results unless you have the correct load order going in. I think mator's tutorial video on smash is a perfect example of this... the reason that patch didn't look right? Because he was using two random mods I recommended without fixing their load order (the load order for those mods is defined by the mod author and is correct in LOOT). People also point out mistakes that Wrye Bash makes, especially with mods like MLU and Scarcity. Again. If your load order is correct, those mistakes won't happen."

 

"The following automated patchers are designed to handle "rule of one" conflicts. They can't fix anything that you couldn't do manually in TES5edit: They don't handle navmesh, VMAD, or other records that need to be edited in the CK. But, they do make these patches a lot faster and easier to make."

 

 

The short of it is your are looking for an easy route. I did the exact same first seeing the wall of red, lol. These "solutions" thought to be answers for doing CR is just creative thinking and acting without knowing "how deep the water is" type of scenario. They are tools to make the patching processes easier, like a UI, than xedit does, but again, no "intuition" for CR as they are designed to only make patches to resolve a conflict. The sad truth is there is no way around CR if you want a game with more than like 6 mods, maybe, :wallbash: :wallbash: :sad: :sad: I've looked everywhere, lol. Its sooooo daunting and booooring!!!!! lol

 

Also, so I am not violating any CW laws or anyone just wants a reference. The above sections were copied from https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/wiki/patching Happy modding!

Edited March 9, 2020 by Indiao21

[OJLMethos]

Merged Patch

can merge some types of conflicts

It cannot do all types of conflicts in all of those records.

merged patch is best for simple changes

 

Patching is not an excuse for shitty load order.

[truncated text]

 

The short of it is your are looking for an easy route. [truncated text]

 

Hey again,

 

I truncated the quote for the sake of space efficiency and wanted to comment on the 3 categories called out above.

 

Merged patches

I wholly agree with your statements - but with no prior experience I wanted to see what it could do and (per my post) it only addressed very simple things (and even then, I had to tweak most entries to make sure it wasn't doing odd stuff).

 

Load Order:

Agreed, obviously. I am confident in my load order as it stands and the manual CR and even the CR of the merged patch was a useful exercise to understand exactly what was being over-written by the various plugins and why X should be after Y. I gained even more confidence that there were no glaring issues with my load order from this experience.

 

Easy Route:

I cant agree with this. I am new to CR and understanding the various facets of each tool (such as these merge functions) is part of learning.... sure, the automated merged patches were an obvious and potential quick solution which would have been awesome if it addressed important issues but as I already mentioned, they deal with superficial issues at best.

 

My closing statement was that I am going to review all 63,000 records in xEdit individually.. that's not exactly the easy route :D

 

Interestingly I am starting to think most of my crashes are script related, below are my 3 main crashes:

1. Crashing when using Spellsiphon spells (a scripted spell mod)... I infrequently crash in combat but when I do, I am typically casting a Spellsiphon spell. Doesn't happen even time so assume there is a "perfect storm" that causes the script to fall over sometimes. This is a very important mod to me, so next step is to check out script CR and talk to the author to see if I can confirm the diagnosis.

2. HDT SMP physics on Cloaks of Skyrim - I think this is the crash most often occurring when I load a game. When I CTD on a load (after say, a death) I see the HDTSMP.dll plugin in the probable crash stack in the .net script framework. I really like physics so not sure what I am going to do about this one, maybe die less :tongue:

3. Something to do with kill moves - less frequent than the above two, sometimes when it goes 3rd person camera for a killmove, the game has a specific crash where mid-killmove it locks up, is "not responding" but doesn't (literally) crash to desktop and I have to kill the process in Task Manger (all others crashes do CTD). Unfortunately I dont get a crash log in this instance so harder to pin down...

Next step for me is to review further conflicts in xEdit and also specifically look at script CR

Edited March 9, 2020 by OJLMethos

[Indio21]

No problem and those were not my statements. Well the very last one you shown was. I just highlighted for points sake. They are right from the link I posted there. Also just a joke on "the easy route". When I seen the red I thought this is going to take forever and got to be an easier way. None I have found yet :sad:, but getting much closer to being done with mine :smile:.

 

A little while back I tried to help another poster with a very vague description of exactly his problem. With the info provided I assumed things along CR and such. As it turned out with like less than six hours playing he was having some script stuff building up and causing a CTD. I was floored with the final answer as we have characters from level 30 to 70 and I do not even know the tool he used to clean it with. Actually hadn't even removed any saves, but anyways maybe it can help you out.

 

See posts 14 and 15 to save some off topic reading https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/8450478-ctds-on-load-screensfast-travel-generally-near-helgen/page-2

Edited March 9, 2020 by Indiao21

[OJLMethos]

I have previously checked out Fallrim tools to look at my saves... I initially did it during testing because I thought that Predator Vision and Immersive Encounters were crashing my tests based on Papy logs and indeed there were a lot of unattached and undefined instances in them.... I haven't checked my recent ones tbh - didn't have a reason to think that existing mods were leaving nasty open scripts but it may be worth alook

 

thanks again LD

[Indio21]

That all is above my learning thus far and I have not noticed any issues with CTDs. Just when you mentioned above they were all tied to script mods it came to mind. I been meaning to follow up on just to verify I am not doing some PM work I should be, but like mentioned I don't have any issues showing that.

 

"4. Next I looked at any "critical conflicts" highlighted by xEdit and to my surprise, all of them were benign false-positives"......This is why we use the groups mentioned in the Tome. When we group them, saying they are all conflicts we want and nothing else in the list keeps them showing, it will remove them the next time QCFC is ran in xedit. Otherwise it is impossible to keep them in memory and why I had to learn to use them also.

 

As an additional fyi to the above mentioned. Thus far my CR has lead me to create 29 personal patches to make my LO work, again thus far, lol. I couldn't even begin to count the number of groups but I can guess at least over 200 by now. I am sure you are seeing the picture here. The groups just help us as a tool to work through LO CR and to manage it when we add new mods afterwards. Then the whole wall of red is not back haunting us. Just the last mods in X groups that are conflicted to the new mod.

 

I should also note to the above mentioned info, I have no idea how many conflicts I resolved just by rearranging mods to fix conflicts shown in xedit. I would have had to start counting them on my own when i began.

Edited March 9, 2020 by Indiao21

[OJLMethos]

Questions I did have from my CR adventure was the importance of:

XLCN - Location: Skyrim.esm had it blank, but some mods and fixes had entries for this e.g. USSEP, LoS II, Majestic Mountains...... then Realistic Water Two - the dedicated water mod - didn't. I understand it's an "exit location" of some description but I dont understand that in the context of water.

XCLW - Water Height: again, some mods changed this, even mods that dont do anything with water such as gildergreen regrown or CACO and others made it "default" like Immersive citizens.

Cell > Data -flags > Show Sky - For dungeons etc I noticed some have these, some dont, some mods change this...

XCCM - Sky/Water from Region - not a clue what this is?

 

Any insight on the above?

Edited March 10, 2020 by OJLMethos

[Indio21]

Now you are catching up to were my knowledge ends as I am right there too. The XLCN is one I already researched and it does need to be carried over into a patch for that location info to appear. Think I may have done the XCLW on one too but not forsure so not comfortable advising on that one.

 

Here is a link to start tracking them down. https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Tes5Mod:Mod_File_Format#Fields

 

All these codes are available on the wiki's for Elder Scrolls and the Creation Kit.

 

Just type what you are looking for in the search bar, upper left, here. Ex. like the XCLW. https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Pa

 

Hope you are following "The Method" in the Tome guide. If you are trying to do your whole LO at once you could make for more problems. As an example Grouping mods before you see all the conflicts, etc.

Edited March 10, 2020 by Indiao21

[OJLMethos]

I actually started fresh and removed all my mods and a clean skyrim install, because I figured with this CR knowledge building up, finding erroneous mods would be much easier when I am installing them vs trying to find the culprit amid the 300+ mods I had installed :D

 

I am not sure what you mean by "the method"?

Edited March 10, 2020 by OJLMethos