Skyrim loaded through skse with vortex instead loads as Vanilla with no DLC or mods attached.

[Darkmega92]

G'day, I'm looking into help for an issue I've come across that has been plaguing my install for a number of weeks at this point.

 

To get the technical stuff out of the way.

I'm using Vortex 1.3.13 set to stable version.

 

Hardlink deployment.

The downloads are on my main drive in the my documents vortex folder. Which are staged onto my gaming and steam separate harddrive to be along with skyrim which is in my steam directory there.

 

Modding Skyrim LE, with a relatively hefty 500+ mods installed (if I could get it to that point without this bug occuring).

 

Environment is a Windows 10, 64 bit with 32 gigs of ram.

 

 

 

I've got an issue where when I run my mod list through skse to play the game it is instead being loaded as a default vanilla game with no DLCs installed as shown when I try to reload one of my early game "testing to make sure nothing explodes instantly" saves which are just freshly out of character creation and new start.

 

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/263952787770048513/768222804327792640/unknown.png

 

I had at first installed all my mods at once relatively haphazardly thinking nothing would go wrong due to them being mostly all the same mods I had used on my previous PC, and so thinking "I had used it all before and it worked, and know roughly what I should merge with what and which things I should probably not merge" etc. with maybe a handful of other additions that I would think were harmless to the already very large picture (mostly textures cause better PC, a player house or two and and some scripted immersion/gameplay tweaks etc. no big new quests etc). But ran into this issue and got frustrated with it as I tested and trialed to no avail when it first occured.

 

So instead I resolved to start the install again and instead install a bit more gradually, testing and playing the game for a little to make sure it ran the game properly at different points in time. (if I had tinkered with it before, on hindsight I should have used profiles to snapshot each instance that I got to where the game was seemingly working before continuing work...)

 

I had installed and tested up to the point where I'm at now since yesterday. I got it to the point where everything was installed and the game would load fine etc, and so I saved and exited out, feeling alright with it and resolved to later just go through and finish up my bashed patch, merging patching and fiddling with incompatibilities with Xedit and then finally running asis and fluffing it all up with dyndolod the next day.

 

But lo and behold, I load up my game today to make sure it's still working, and it's gone to crap again with this issue out of the blue and is now loading the same load order from the other night as if nothing is installed and I'm severely perplexed, as the only thing I did between then was rebuild a bashed patch with the Z-merged plugins intact and turned on. Then runned the Merged patch in Xedit and fiddled with a few conflicting values that used the wrong CACO data for drinks and stuff then stopped to play some other games thinking to finish up the patch checking and dyndolod etc later.

 

Anyone have an idea what could be occurring, or atleast a hunch I could follow up on? Could it be some corruption? A filing issue? mod overload? :V

[VulcanTourist]

The DLC is embedded with SSE, you can't actually start the game with any of it absent... unless you've been Very Bad and deleted the Master plugins and/or BSA files for all of them.

 

Do you also own original Skyrim or Legendary? Is it possible that you're not using SKSE64 but instead SKSE(32) and actually launching SLE rather than SSE? Share some details about your SKSE(64?) launch button in the Dashboard and the details of what SKSE(64?) version you have installed.

 

(Personal gripe: I wish everyone would stop being lazy and describing BOTH versions as "SKSE", because that accurately describes only one of the two and is misleading if the other is what was meant! It would save a lot of headache and confusion when people screw up which one to use, and they sometimes do.)

[Darkmega92]

sorry, I mentioned I used Legendary. so, legendary being the original with all DLCs present as separate files. SKSE for original. since I guess the 64 is for special edition. apologies.

 

it's the skse version installed via steam, (1_9_32 if thats the version of it on it's DLL?) to go along with the original. it has that precache plugin installed in it that apparently stops some crashes, among all the other mods etc with scripts in it's folder.

 

File that runs skyrim is just skse_loader.exe, and it's set to primary in my dash board and I'm running it in admin mode just incase that could alleviate any bug wanting to happen. on the previous attempt when I installed all in one go presuming it'd run as not too much was changed I even installed the skse from the latest installer for original skyrim legendary from the website but the bug had been occurring when that was the case also.

 

I still use original due to wanting to make sure everything I did have, I'll still have, and not wanting to have to redownload my entire downloaded mod folder worth of mods again, since LE had treated me well enough even when using vortex last time also on the previous PC, until I stopped playing for some time until just recently since I got the new computer and now these shenanigans with everything being unloaded.

 

As for masters, wryebash etc doesn't detect anything out of whack. although I did realize that gotobed's plugins which didn't have gotobed main plugin as a master were being vortex-loot sorted before the main gotobed plugin but thats fixed and never seemed to cause issues atleast on the surface level while I was testing and installing as I went. :V

 

Can't touch original launcher of skyrim even to do settings for visuals etc (although thankfully can do those in nvidia experience, although ENB is processing the visuals anyway) cause it makes all mods just magically reactivate themselves without vortex's say so, and so I gotta figure out what is installed but disabled due to merges and bashed patches etc again. >_<'

[VulcanTourist]

My apologies for skipping over where you specifically said that you were modding SLE rather than SSE, rendering most of what I wrote moot. What I latched onto was your mention of having 500 mods, which would be quite difficult to manage in SLE with the limit of 254 plugins unless half the mods have no plugins at all...

 

If you're getting SKSE(32) through Steam, that should always AFAIK be the most recent version (1.7.3) for the game.

 

It's almost as if you're using a separate Vortex profile with no mods specified at all to access common saved games created with a different profile and actual mods installed with it. Instead you mention regretting only having one profile.

 

There's still the matter of the DLC plugins not being found. Even a profile shouldn't be able to affect that, since Vortex doesn't manage them directly... does it? Have I forgotten how the DLC was handled?

[Darkmega92]

I have to use Zmerge and a bashed patch to compress smaller mods and patches together so they take less space, otherwise I end up with 550 plugins. :V

 

but yeah, I looked up the issue and only found one or two others with it bur neither came to a visible resolution on their threads (they were on reddit), but one of them had a post that make a similar speculation, where an empty profile was for some reason being loaded in place of my fully modded profile despite all the mods already being deployed and ready to go.

 

I've been thinking of trying the experimental "Copy deployment" option after I first purge whats there of the hardlink deploy, then trying it to see if it makes any difference with actual physical files there rather than the apparent hardlinks. But been waiting on a second opinion either from this thread or my bug report from earlier today because I go messing with stuff that's not main.

 

As for DLCs they're in the plugin menu as checkable esm plugins aswell in the original. but you can turn them on and off in both a mod launcher's profile/gui or the main launcher's mod/data list.

[VulcanTourist]

Hardlinks ARE "physical files". NTFS filesystem references - pointers - to file data are stored separate and distinct from that data. Even the first visible copy of a newly created file is a hardlink! Creating another hardlink is just adding another pointer to the same data. Creating a copy of a "file" duplicates BOTH the file data AND creates a single new hardlink to that new copy.

 

Thus, there is no functional difference whatsoever between an extra hardlink to existing file data and a copy of the original file data with its new hardlink. The difference in doing the latter is unnecessarily wasted storage space (and denying Vortex anything to manage).

[Darkmega92]

then what else can be suggested to remedy the issue then? :V

 

edit: for now, gonna clone the profile at full install then see if removing some of stuff I last installed back towards the last set of mods benchmark I had of it working, and possibly see if verifying cache does anything for me.

[VulcanTourist]

At the least, creating a new profile can't hurt anything in the existing one. As you know, that's the point of them. You can experiment without risking the original.

[Darkmega92]

well, as I thought, I removed a handful of mods, and loaded the game and it seems fine at a glance (other than random alternate start spawning me inside a pillar in riverwood I guess cause of edits by one of my settlement overhauls).

 

gotta run around and check for content etc that should be in, but... I want to say the issue is some kind of arbitrary "critical mass" of scripts/content needing to be loaded by the script precacher or something before the game starts perhaps...? Since the things I removed were ravengate, an arena based quest mod, Pirates of skyrim which is the northern cardinal player home with added mechanics like sailing around the sea of ghosts and hiring a crew from your friends and another rather big player house thing that you gotta construct first.

 

Was hesitant to yeet carved brink and project AHO or forgotten city or god forbid, legacy of the dragonborn.

 

although this was without the bashed patch or merged patch to expedite reloading the game to test if any content loads at all... so... a couple more things may or may not need to come out depending on my luck...

 

but the question still stands, if this is related to something I have installed, or vortex, or just having too much content? Because obviously all those mods should work/have worked previously in one way or another if installed on a game that wasn't quite as loaded up as mine. it's also curious that I'd hit this kind of thing on a new and much stronger PC now, rather than my old windows 7. But if it's just overloaded, I might've just gotten lucky and barely missed it and then just accidentally went over with the extra bits and pieces I accrued while looking around.

[VulcanTourist]

A less conflict-prone alternate-start mod is Realm of Lorkhan. Even when combined with 500-700 other mods I haven't had a single conflict that I could trace back to it. That was not so with ASLAL, and it got replaced.