CTD in Darkfall Passage

[polearbair]

Not to be confused with Darkfall Cave.

 

Darkfall Cave is the part before you meet Gelebor, Darkfall Passage as the part you wind up in after stepping through that first portal that Gelebor opens up for you.

 

That said, I can get into Darkfall Passage just fine, so it's not that I crash instantly on load. It's about halfway through that I crash.

 

There's that room with the pool of water that you have to swim down and through an underwater cave to find that Note form Darkfall part 1. I get past that and then continue though the cave around a bend where you come to that obvious falmer spring loaded trap on the left with no apparent tripwire but a short tunnel off to the right that you can use to bypass the trap completely and in the next big open spacious room after that is where I ctd.

 

I tried reloading a previous save from before ever entering Darkfall Cave and dismissed all followers except the mandatory Serana of course, then made a new save and quit the game. I then open that new save in Fallrim Tools Resaver and cleaned out the one orphaned script it found and re-saved with a new name.

 

Then I launched Skyrim SE and loaded that save to try again and still I ctd at that same point part way through Darkfall Passage.

 

Google searches haven't turned up anything helpful so here I am again hoping someone else has had this same problem and found a solution.

[polearbair]

Okay, so while I was waiting for a response here I went back to that previous save before entering darkfall cave and just buggered off to do some other quests to kill time.

 

After about a day and a half of no replies I decided to give it another try. I was 99% certain it would still ctd at that some spot since it was doing it consistently and I've made no changes to my load order but miraculously I made it through Darkfall Passage without any CTDs.

 

The only thing different is that I went off and did some unrelated quests first. The quests I did were mainly Legacy of the Dragonborn quests; Haunted Museum, The museum heist, It Belongs in a Museum and the Elsweyr mod, Excavation of Windcaller Pass, Branching Out (Northern Field Station) and that's pretty much it.

 

I have no idea why Darkfall Passage would ctd consistently at that same exact spot before doing any of those quest but not after or which quest if any was really the problem. Not really enough to go on to form any kind of concrete conclusion but if anybody else experiences consistent CTDs at that point maybe try doing some of the above mentioned quests first is all I can suggest.

 

Any way, the problem seems to have cleared itself up.