Skyrim hiccups on saving.

[llloyd]

Here is an odd one. I am running Win 10, Ryzen 1700x, 16gb of ddr4 for Ryzen systems (Gskill). I had Skyrim on a mechanical drive, a WD Black 4tb. Recently I noticed there was a way to move individual games to a different install folder. So I moved Skyrim over onto the SSD, a Samsung 860 EVO 1tb that I use for a boot drive. Made absolutely sure it wasn't to /program files or /program files(86), it's moved to C:\Steam so there wouldn't be any permissions issues. Yet even after the move of both Skyrim and NMM to C: the stupid thing still hiccups every time it autosaves. At this point I dunno, how do I smooth this out? Umm... * looks * Right, save files are stored in My Documents/My Games/Skyrim/Saves , which, again, is on the Samsung 860 Evo SSD. So, how do I smooth this out so it doesn't hiccup so bad that my game stops for a couple of seconds when I Quick Save or it Autosaves?

[wfandrews]

It is recommended to turn off autosaves and use quicksave sparingly. There have been problems associated with both.

 

For myself I always turn off autosaves and delete my quicksaves after exiting the game.

 

Like most advice you will get on these forums there will be arguments for and against but it will at least solve your your problem and it really does not take that much effort to esc into the menu and make a save.

[llloyd]

It is recommended to turn off autosaves and use quicksave sparingly. There have been problems associated with both.

 

For myself I always turn off autosaves and delete my quicksaves after exiting the game.

 

Like most advice you will get on these forums there will be arguments for and against but it will at least solve your your problem and it really does not take that much effort to esc into the menu and make a save.

 

Yeah but Autosave has saved my bacon on a few occasions. You know, the "Oh yeah, this guy should be easy." and next you know he's plowed through your health faster than a fat kid at a all you can eat buffet. That or a save that gets corrupt the prior autosave keeps you from losing too much progress. >.< As for Quick Save, I use that a lot as a vampire. Every time, before I feed, I use it just in case my victim survives, as if they do then it's a reload, retry, reload, retry, etc until they drop dead like they're suppose to. >.<

 

But that doesn't answer the question on why a save, to an SSD, causes the game to pause like it was saving to a much slower mechanical drive? There shouldn't be bottlenecking.

[Gorgopis]

Our experience correlates with that of @wfandrews.

We end up with corrupted saves with autosave on, and using quick-save. An excellent set of PC specs and SSD cannot really alter or solve Skyrim's weird save-caching, we think.

The game allocates certain methodologies to how the player makes saves.

1) We turn off autosave, and we never quick-save. We never overwrite a save. Just like in Breath of the Wild, the game may knock your character down. Get ready!

2a) May we suggest: make one or two new hard-saves before any special location or combat? Also, suggest making a new hard-save every 15-20 minutes or so?

2b) You may already be using the console command pcb, before saving, sometimes? And saving the game when in small interior cells or locations is sometimes useful, to preserve progress.

3) As extra precaution to prevent corrupted or hiccupped saves, when exiting the game, first exit to the SR screen menu, THEN quit from that menu to your PC desktop--perhaps avoid a straight quit/exit from game to desktop.

4) Periodically, after exiting the game, we purge (delete) saves (and their SKSE metadata) from our save folder. These are saves that we don't want or need anymore, every three days or so, and we keep only the saves

that are crucial junctions in quests, or when we want to experiment or try a different replay of dungeons and quests.

Notes*

In our opinions, save-related crashes and hiccups usually result, because Skyrim adds (gathers) more and more object/quest/cell references into each auto-save and into each quick-save, during a prolonged session.

There's no real need, though, for each new save to keep earlier cell references from cells (in-game-locations) your characters aren't in anymore.

* We also have a second theory that SKSE, as useful as it is, may corrupt saves. Formerly, we were going into our save folders after each session and deleting the SKSE saves and keeping just the ESS ones.

The SKSE saves are metadata and much smaller in size, and we're guessing they were referencing unneeded cell-reference data preserved in save-bloat, linked to their correlated ESS saves. Every time you save,

SKSE will write a second file with this metadata, and record it with the ESS save it links to, both with the same times and dates. So, after each play-session, you can visit the save folders and see the new SKSE data added.

SKSE will load an ESS save without its SKSE metadata, and just write new metadata when you do another save after a new game-play session.

Then you can also try some save-cleaners available at nexus-mods. We haven't needed those for a long time, though, since we started saving games as in this post.

GL!

[llloyd]

@Gorgopis Apologies. I am trying to process what you said. It goes counter to everything I've learned when it comes to RPGs. Rule one is always 'Save often'. for you never know what's going to happen, and if you save infrequently you might lose a tonne of progress. Fast travel to Tel Mithryn and you have 3 ash spawn and a blood dragon waiting while your low on health? Try to drain a guard dry and he lives? Accidentally sell a rare valuable item and don't realize it until later? Trying to assassinate someone from the shadows and he lives to alert the guards? Etc, etc, etc, a thousand things can go wrong due to RNG, bad luck, doing something stupid, etc. So rule one is save often. Hence the autosave and quick saves for when you know your doing something risky. Now, I will hunt around to see if I can find an PCB mod that'll do that on a regular basis and see if that helps.

 

Or maybe not, Thallassa in this post - https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/3354530-there-is-some-automatic-pcb-mod/ - says with an ENB (Which I use) and the latest SKSE patch I should never need to use PCB. Hmm...

[MFitz56]

I have no desire to be contrary and absolutely none in starting a flame war. Years ago I read and followed the advice given above per someone else's recommendations. At that point it did seem to make some minor improvement in the stability of my Skyrim LE game. However, in the interim, and with a lot of help, I've learned the tools and tricks to make my game work with nary a hiccup and the save rules above are not part of it. I routinely violate everything that was suggested.

 

What I've done (by trial and error) can best be described in this blog post:

 

https://www.loverslab.com/blogs/entry/7521-conglomerate-01-installing-skyrim-stability-fixes-tools/

 

For the record, this is NOT my blog post but I believe it to encapsulate the best wisdom in trying to get Skyrim LE to work appropriately.

[Gorgopis]

@IIIoyd, (and @Mfitz56)

 

We don't think we're disagreeing with you here. We know we are wordy. (The "we" here is two of us using this account and the same techniques for play.)

 

We also save often, just before travel or a cell change. (But we always "hard save". We don't overwrite an existing save. We never use quick-save.)

 

So, if you wanted to travel from Raven Rock to Tel Mithryn, for example, not knowing what to expect, we were recommending you make a hard save before the travel.

We don't use the F5 function key. In game, before travel, or a load-screen entry way, we use the esc key to access the save menu, and make a new save. In our current play-through we're on save no. 953.

We have also deleted hundreds of the earlier saves we no longer need.

 

We also gave a lot of hypotheses about why saves get corrupted or hiccup, only in case you were interested in theories about why a high-end PC, like yours, could still struggle with making clean SR-saves.

 

We downloaded a tiny easy mod, (called bat clean1 and bat clean2, (?), sorry no link here, but a search on those will yield results) that can be used in console with PCB to purge bloated cell-buffers and references before saving.

We haven't needed it for a long time, though. See below.

 

@MFitz56,

 

We always enjoy your answers and kindness, so you never need worry about a flame-war with us. We followed your link, a bit nervous about its location.

 

Frankly, last year, we had already completed all the actions recommended in the linked post, to mixed results. (@IIIoyd may indeed find your recommended link useful!)

 

The difference for us is that it centers on NMM users.

 

We use Vortex, and Vortex seems to have helped sort out our stability issues--and we can't explain why.

 

We have not had to tinker any more with the .ini files or follow the STEP project recently--at all.

 

We don't know why, because we did revalidate our game at STEAM, a few months ago, and since we have been using the hard-save-game methods above, we have achieved good

reliable stability. Truthfully, we're only using 52 mods. We don't know what would happen if we went to 131 mods. We might have to go back to using STEP.

 

Everyone reading over our shoulders here will likely find other users on this forum who also avoid quick-saves and overwriting saves.

 

I know a couple who have confirmed on other threads about not using quick-saves or overwrites.

 

Respectfully offered.

[llloyd]

Ok. So, after all that it looks better, and the ENB change (Intentional but not the way I intended, updated the .dll, updated to a newer ENB preset, and broke the Night Eye effect totally. Downgraded to the old ENB and Night Eye was still broken. Researched and changed the ENB to a completely different one with a plugin that tweaks the ENB when Night Eye is active and that fixed the ENB / Night Eye issue >.< Hey, as a plus it seems to have fixed Claralux too, so yay! ) , but it still hiccups on saves, be it a hard save, auto save, or quick save. Like the game can't write 30 mb (The last ESS is 30,128 KB) and continue to process the game at the same time. >.< Oh and the matching SKSE co-save is only 10KB, so, yeah. My game is pretty optimized as it is it seems.

[Gorgopis]

Still Hiccupping? Not loading? Not reloadable? Won't save at all? Not sure if you still need the following wordy discussion. . . .

 

++++

 

We scanned through the sizes of all our saves, on fifteen different Vortex Profiles, about 500 saved-games in all, and we could not find one save over 13,000 kb. We only run on our busiest Vortex profile only 55 mods, which may have something to do with the relatively smaller size of our saves. We're still have saving-success, as did @wfandrews in the thread above.

 

Ideas:

 

Are you playing SR online at STEAM? Or do you play offline? Are you on PC? We play SR on PC exclusively offline.

1). If you play SR online at STEAM, "broken" saves may be playable, if at first they won't load and your SR CTD. But don't delete any seemingly broken saves yet. Try this, first. Load an earlier save that still works. As soon as you're in-game, let all sound EFX fade, then open the save-load menu, and now try to load the most recent game that wouldn't load before. Sometimes it will load, now. Play for 15-30 seconds, and then save again. Now, still in-game, open and use the console to purge cell buffers (pcb + enter). When you pcb, you should see a very interesting list appear in the console window, showing perhaps unnecessary object and quest-references that were removed. Now, after pcb-ing, move around for a few seconds and save again. This may preserve your savable progress.

2). Another technique is to remember which interior or exterior location you were in on the save that won't load. Start SR. Load any game in your save list right after you just finished Alduin's first attack at Helgen, if you have one. If you don't, load a early, low-kilobyte game that still loads. Now, open the console, look up the coc codes on the UESP wiki, for the exterior/interior location where your broken save is. Type in coc with the right code and travel to that broken location, and see if the location loads. If it does, the game's cell-references are OK. Now, make a save after coc. Beware that overusing the console can sometimes lead to corrupted saves. Now, while in that save, access the save-menu in-game and try loading the latest broken save. If that works, use pcb, and save the game and your progress. For extra insurance, after this last save-step, add the player-kill console method. Open the console again, type player.kill + enter. Your player will die, but Skryim will return your character to your location, but cleaning unnecessary references. In other words, the game will reload with your character alive at that same location. Now save. This save should be "clean" now, and you can progress. Maybe check your save size, on this save, later, to find out if you're still at 30 KB +.

3). If you're playing offline, as we do, you may try going online and then revalidating all of your SR files at STEAM, by following online tutorials on how to do that. Once you log into STEAM, revalidate your SR files. Now see if you can load the broken save. If it still won't load, try the above steps. If the broken save now does load, play online for a minute or so and then make a save; then take STEAM offline again. This step has stabilized our saves, and we're not having crashes. We have one theory that STEAM's update-timer may corrupt or interfere with SR saves. (I.e., conspiracy-theory: STEAM needs you to revisit STEAM to see what's for sale, so, it has coding that times out your saves.)

4). Finally, here is a bit of extra bother that once kept our SR saves stable. When exiting the game, first exit to SR menu, then quit to desktop--not straight exit to desktop. Periodically, after exiting the game, we purge saves (and their correlated SKSE metadata) from our save folder that we don't need anymore, every three days or so, and we keep only the saves that are crucial junctions in quests, or that we want to experiment with or to replay dungeons.

In our opinions, crashes usually result because Skyrim adds (gathers) more and more object and quest and cell references to each game save, during a prolonged session. There's no real need, though, for each new save to keep earlier cell references from cells (in-game-locations) your characters aren't in anymore.

5). We also have a second theory that SKSE, as useful as it is, may corrupt saves. Formerly, we were going into our save folders after each session and deleting the SKSE saves and keeping just the ESS ones. The SKSE saves are metadata and much smaller in size, and we're guessing they were referencing unneeded cell-reference data preserved in save-bloat, linked to their correlated ESS saves. Every time you save, SKSE will write a file with this metadata, and record it with the ESS save it links to, both with the same times and dates. So, after each play-session, you can visit the save folders and see the new SKSE data added.

We're beginning to suspect you're on PC you have some background process, say a firewall, or virus-checker, or an app that tries to update on a periodic cycle. These updates will interfere with SR's saves, if they coincide. You can search how to reset/personalize the update cycles for any apps.

GL.

Edited February 2, 2021 by Gorgopis

[llloyd]

Yeah, still hiccuping, and now I have a random crash to desktop with no error messages. I've removed mods, added mods, sorted with Loot, rebuilt the bash patch in Wyre Bash, and started with a fresh new character. Since then it's randomly crashed. Anything from 5 min to several hours then poof, I am staring at the desktop. I can be riding a horse, in battle, looting corpses, in a conversation with NPCs, etc, doesn't matter, poof, crash! Been tweaking with the enboost.ini and sksi.ini a little with no success.>.< Like I found that STEP says to set ExpandSystemMemoryX64=false if, in SKSE.ini you have the memory patch set (DefaultHeapInitialAllocMB=512 ), I set the DefaultHeapInitialAllocMB to 512 from 768, set the AutodetectVideoMemorySize=true and it set it to something over 16,000, forget the exact number. I have 16Gb of DDR4 and a MSI 1070 Ti with 8Gb of video memory. I've run the memory detect tool, it spat out 16224, and, going by STEP, subtracted 350 from that (15874) as I am on Win 10 and set AutodetectVideoMemorySize=false, nope. Set video memory size to 8196 (just the Vram, no system memory), nope. I did notice with AutodetectVideoMemory=true that it would display the Video Memory size on start up, but after setting it false it stopped. Anyway...

 

Mods and load order

 

 

 

 

Skyrim.esm=1

Update.esm=1

Dawnguard.esm=1

HearthFires.esm=1

Dragonborn.esm=1

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ethereal_elven_overhaul.esp=1

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CLARALUX.esp=1

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aMidianborn_Skyforge_Weapons.esp=1

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Better Vampires.esp=1

Ars Metallica - Legendary Edition.esp=1

vAutosaveManager.esp=1

AZ Argonian & Khajiit Vampire No Color Change.esp=1

Crimson Tide - Blood.esp=1

LocalizedGuildJobs.esp=1

BFT Ships and Carriages.esp=1

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Crossbows Basic Collection - Merchant LVL List and Bandit LVL List Fix.esp=1

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Dragon GMod.esp=1

helmetwithcirclet.esp=1

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Marriable Serana.esp=1

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More Interesting Loot for Skyrim.esp=1

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ENBLocal.ini

[PROXY]

EnableProxyLibrary=true

InitProxyFunctions=true

ProxyLibrary=d3d9injFX.dll

[GLOBAL]

UsePatchSpeedhackWithoutGraphics=false

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ForceFakeVideocard=false

IgnoreCreationKit=true

[PERFORMANCE]

SpeedHack=true

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[MULTIHEAD]

ForceVideoAdapterIndex=false

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[MEMORY]

ExpandSystemMemoryX64=false

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DisableDriverMemoryManager=false

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VideoMemorySizeMb=8196

EnableCompression=false

AutodetectVideoMemorySize=false

[WINDOW]

ForceBorderless=false

ForceBorderlessFullscreen=false

[ENGINE]

ForceAnisotropicFiltering=true

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AddDisplaySuperSamplingResolutions=false

ForceLodBias=false

LodBias=0.0

VSyncSkipNumFrames=0

[LIMITER]

WaitBusyRenderer=false

EnableFPSLimit=false

FPSLimit=60.0

SKSE.ini

[General]

ClearInvalidRegistrations=1

[Memory]

DefaultHeapInitialAllocMB=512

ScrapHeapSizeMB=256