thunderclam

No worries. I did figure out a way to solve the problem that I hope will be applicable when/if it manifests again. I really want to trace it to its source, though. I think it would be beneficial in many ways to understand why this is happening even if it isn't going to derail my experience due to workarounds.

@Sparrow: if you can help me figure this out, I'd be terribly obliged. @Kyl: Yeah but I'm pretty sure the issue isn't caused by Helgen Reborn. It's something else. Have encountered versions of this bug in the MQ and unrelated adventuring before ever starting Helgen Reborn. Also I can't be hitting the mem limit while using SKSE and Enboost can I? I also don't have the mod he mentions. I'm pretty sure the author wrote that FAQ before modders got around the 3.1 memory limit.

Yeah. If we can figure this crap out someday, I think we'll be helping a lot of people. I google stuff like this and only see people who never find an answer and many of whom probably end up uninstalling and reinstalling Skyrim until they eventually quit with frustration. I've done that twice since I found out about STEP. I made a deal with myself to let some things go this time around and it's working out pretty well.

Good to know, thanks guys. I'd be interested in an alternative to SRO due to its weight on RAM/VRAM more than anything. But that said, what a beautiful dang mod.

I've never tried PCB but I may do that if need be. That said, I resolved the Skywatch CTD by simply waiting 24 hours before exiting Skywatch Crypt (Helgen Reborn) and then successfully exited Skywatch Pass without CTD. I never thought waiting just 24 hours would work in a million years, but it did. I will try that again if this problem occurs somewhere else. If it doesn't work, I will try PCB.

Being that your work has mostly been STEP plus many other mods, I figure this might be the best place to try and troubleshoot a reoccurring problem I've been having. I made two threads about this issue, when I thought it wasn't the same thing, on the General Troubleshooting forum. The most recent one is here: https://forum.step-project.com/topic/7899-reproducible-ctd-when-exiting-reeking-cave-during-diplomatic-immunity/ Please check that thread for my Load Order as well as my Mem Blocks Log the most recent time I experienced the crash I described in the thread. I have no idea why exiting Skywatch Pass should tip my Mem Blocks usage so far over the edge that the game CTDs. If I teleport away from the area from within Skywatch Pass via console, I cannot return to the general area in the Tamriel Worldspace without another CTD. I have poked around in TESVedit to see if there are any weird issues, but mostly it's just ELFX Enhancer and I've tried running this stuff with that mod disabled and still experienced the CTD. My current theory is that it's a rogue script. No idea how to check that out. What I'm looking for here is some guidance based on TESVedit and my load order in how to approach sourcing this issue. I have rigorously tried different approaches to the area, but the problem seems to be trigger when inside Skywatch Crypt and fighting the bandits added by Helgen Reborn. I've killed some and successfully exited back to the Skyrim worldspace. However, killing them all and doing the same has led to CTD every time. I have no idea why, since the last time I encountered this issue it was caused by aggro'd but unreachable (without console cheating) Thalmor Guards at the Embassy. Retrying that quest and using the console to walk through the necessary walls to kill those guards is what fixed it for me then. I have tried similar methods in Skywatch Crypt to no avail. So I'm desperate for some help here because I don't want entire regions of Skyrim to be inaccessible due to CTDs. UPDATE: The radius of the issue extends pretty wide around South Skywatch Pass (the tower area). This means using the road North of Helgen is impossible without CTD. Fast Traveling works because you are deposited on the East entrance of the town. This time my memory Block Log was under 300 on Block 1 and Under 200 on Block 2 which I think is okay, right? So I don't think I'm hitting a memory bottleneck. The CTD seems less straightforward than that. So what kind of problem can cause an entire chunk of the worldspace to "corrupt" and cause CTDs? UPDATE 2: So I tried simply waiting 24 hours on my test save just before exiting Skywatch Crypt. After waiting, I exited the Crypt and then the Pass and then fast-traveled between the two entrances (North and South) and then walked around outside of Helgen and on the path to South Skywatch Pass (tower). Unbelievably, the problem is gone. I'd still really like to know what causes this so I can avoid it in future. Hopefully if I get it again, I can do the "wait 24 hours" to fix it!

Speaking of which, this may not be the time nor place, but I never understood STEP's attitude toward torrents. Is it a guilt by association with piracy thing?

So. I have encountered this bug again and I am starting to think I've seen it before, with this build, at least twice besides now and the Thalmor Embassy incidence. Now the problem is occurring when doing the Skywatch portion of Helgen Reborn. I have rigorously tested various stages of the quest, including the area around it to see if anything is triggering that might cause CTD in the region affected (same thing... a whole chunk of the world surrounding the problem area cannot be approached without CTD). It seems that at some point in the Helgen Reborn-added part of Skywatch Pass, whatever bug is causing this gets triggered. I believe it's some kind or rogue script so I'll be checking papyrus to find out if it shows there. I believe I had this problem with other characters on this MO profile, though. Once at Driftshade Refuge and once near Halted Streams Camp. It seems that some kind of script gets triggered in wildlife or NPCs in that area and the game will CTD if you get close. I am not sure if some in-game time passing will resolve this, but since the regions affected are pretty large, I'm not eager to find out. I checked my Mem Blocks log and saw these higher than normal values. No idea what could be causing that unless leaving Skywatch Pass is supposed to trigger a Helgen Reborn-related event... couldnt' find any info about this.

That's bizarre. I don't think any of my mods explicitly add potions, is the thing. I mean, unless it's some extraneous part of one of the larger content mods I have? Does anything stand out from my load order?

Any ideas, TechAngel? Could it be a SkyUI problem of some kind? Too many potions in my inventory, kind of thing?

Sorry about all the troubleshooting posts lately, but I don't seem to have much luck in more general topics so I am trying to be specific to any problem I encounter. This one is weird, but I consistently get reports that I do not have any Grand Soul Gems in my inventory when trying to capture Grand Souls from creatures like Master Vampires, certain Dragur, etc. I have 17 empty Grand Soul Gems since I've noticed this problem. I have tried dropping them and picking them back up but the game still insists I don't have them in my inventory. I have definitely filled Grand gems before, including Black Soul gems, so I am not sure what could be causing this except for Acquisitive Soul Gems. The only other soul gem mod I use is Soul Gems Differ but I use one of the default color packs instead of the STEP recommended. I also made them weightless and can't recall just now if STEP recommends that or not. I checked out the Nexus thread on Acquisitive Soul Gems and didn't see anyone having this issue. Only other place I saw it after some google-fu was Steam user forums, but no solution was ever found. Load Order

Just what it says on the title. I tried figuring this out on my own since it only happens very infrequently with no consistent trigger that I can detect. I don't believe I have any mods that affect potions except for the STEP Extended mods, but here's my load order anyway:

I have had a similar problem every time I've done a STEP install, with or without additional mods. The way I handle it is the console command "player.kill". I have given up trying to source or solve this issue, and have instead learned to live with it. This is how it goes for me: 1. All quicksaving and autosaving functions are disabled. I only manually save, and I frequently make "hard" new saves. 2. I always make a hard save immediately after booting up the game. I then load that save and save over the file. 3. I will CTD any time I perform step #2. Occasionally if I forget, after playing for a while this will not happen but in the past I have lost a lot of time/progress by forgetting. I remember 99% of the time now to do the next bit: 4. Upon starting Skyrim and loading my save, I immediately console command "player.kill" and then perform Steps #1 and #2 and I no longer crash when saving for the entirety of the play session. If I turn the game off or CTD, I follow the same procedure without exception just to make sure. I have never been able to figure out what causes this issue. In the old days, the only bug known to do stuff like this was during the Vaermina quest in Dawnstar and that is a well known bug that may even have been fixed by now. Other than that, I cannot help you figure out what causes this. I doubt that it's the big game overhauls like Perma or SkyRe as I have always had this issue without ever using those mods.

My response is contingent on the country you live in, I expect, but: Unlike Nozzer (and no offense intended here), I don't think torrents are anything to be scared of. The people who go after you for "piracy" are almost universally content providers and their lawyers. No one will go after you for a torrent that is not tied to an illegal use of an IP ("stolen" music, for example, is a target... free stuff like public domain ebooks or legal game modifications are not targeted). With regard to the client program itself, I would use QBitorrent or another lightweight client. They are less likely to install malware or adware on your computer when you install the program, and they do not use ads which can also lead to malware/adware. I would avoid uTorrent for these reasons. These clients are perfectly legal in North America. It's one of those "not what you use but how you use it" sort of things. If this is about file safety... well, torrents in general have always been generally safer than P2P programs like Kazaa or Limewire from way back in the day. That said, you have to rely on the community to vet stuff you may be interested in downloading. When it comes to legal stuff like public domain books, music, movies, and legal game mods there is not much incentive for putting viruses, malware, etc in the files being downloaded. In this case, STEP vets the SRO mod fully as does the Skyrim modding community at large. The only reason it's a torrent is because the file is so big that other methods of downloading are unreliable at best. It is not the only mod out there where this is the case.

Thanks. It's good to have this confirmed. I have a few friends who also use STEP nowadays (I converted them) and things like this are easier for them if I can answer 'em. Not everybody will ask trivial questions like this on the forum.

I checked the STEP wiki for this and it seemed to confirm that the tag missing esps on saves is just a header unless it also lists some esps that may actually be missing. Is this true? Right clicking the save and hitting "fix mods" shows nothing in the window that generates, which seems to confirm that it's just a header. Still, though, I can see the appearance of that text scaring a lot of people into thinking their saves are corrupt. :P Just thought I'd confirm this with you guys.

No one has anything on this issue?

Totally know what you mean about having someone around to bounce ideas off of. I was sort of hoping someone would have seen this before and gone like "A-HA! The culprit is x" but that rarely happens. That said, the Enhancer doesn't appear to be the problem. UPDATE 5 or "How I fixed this super annoying crap through luck and long shots" Had a flash of memory from playing last night and realized that something strange did happen before I tried to exit Reeking Cave and finish the quest. Upon reaching the Embassy, I fast-traveled away and back again, to make sure just entering the area didn't trigger the CTD bug. So far so good. When I left the main Embassy building to head to Elanwen's Solar, I triggered aggro with the Thalmor guards outside the Solar. I fought and killed them in the open and noticed I'd also drawn aggro from the guards posted at the entrance to the embassy itself. These guards are not easy to get to without turning collision off, so I ignored them and got on with the quest. That is the reason I was getting CTD. I thought it was a LOOOOOONG shot but I loaded up a save from before jumping on the carriage at Katla's Farm. I proceeded through the quest speedily, using TGM to make the fights easier. When I got out into the courtyard again, I turned TCL on and killed ALL of the exterior Thalmor Guards. I then fast-traveled to the STEED stone nearby and fast-traveled again to the embassy just to confirm that the CTD bug had not manifested before this point. After this, I proceeded with the quest as normal, brazenly and God-modingly killing everything in my path. When it came time to exit Reeking Cave, I said a brief prayer to Akatosh and Talos and everybody else and went through. And it worked! So this confirms that leaving hostile enemies in the exterior area of Thalmor Embassy totally broke the area, causing CTDs within a certain proximity. I've messed around a bit with fast-travel and it appears the bug is no longer manifest.

An update: I managed to finally coc to SolitudeExterior01 and this indicates to me that something is wrong with the area around the Embassy, where I will likely now crash anytime I fast travel there. I decided to test this and yes, sure enough, fast traveling to the Thalmor Embassy immediately CTD'd the game. I do not know that going there on foot will have the same effect, but I suspect so because I have seen this kind of problem before where an area in Skyrim just becomes non-traversable due to CTD. Usually this is the result of removing a mod that added or changed something in that cell/worldspace. However, I have not done that in this mod profile. This means it's still a mod doing it, but it may be very difficult to determine which. My next move will be to look at the cell/worldspace data in TESVedit to see if that shakes anything loose. However, I'm not very good with that utility so I doubt I'll learn anything. This doesn't exactly kill my game, after all, but it is annoying. I will also need to figure out whether I can approach the embassy on foot. If not, it may cause serious problems in this playthrough due to InterestingNPCs and other quests nearby. UPDATE 2: A peek in TESVEdit, which as predicted is more info than I know what to do with, does show that ThalmorEmbassyExterior01 has records from ELFX Enhancer being overwritten by Alt Start-Live Another Life. Can this cause a CTD? I really wish I knew what to look for here. UPDATE 3: Sure enough, I cannot approach Thalmor Embassy on foot w/o CTD. I am going to try to disable a few different mods I think might be responsible: ELFX Enhancer and Alt-Start and see if the game just crashes anyway due to dependencies or something. Sigh. UPDATE 4: Neither of those mods appear to be responsible. Disabling them and approaching the area still crashed the game.

Ah, sorry, check the main post again. I'll update the info.

I can't escape the cave. I've even tried COC to get out, but this also crashes to desktop. Anyone have any idea where I can begin trying to figure out what is causing this? I heavily doubt it's memory related. The rest of the quest went fine, but with this issue I can't continue and I suspect rolling back to an old save and doing it over again will lead to the same result. So much time wasted if I try that and it turns out to be the case. Hopefully I can spare myself that. :P Specs: Windows 7 64-bit AMD Radeon 6950 2GB (dxdiag says Approx Total Mem is 1768mb, which seems wrong as I remember 2048 last I checked) 8GB RAM Intel i5-2500k @3.30GHZ (4 cores) Direct X 11 Load Order: Other Info: No mod changes in over 60 hours of gameplay except the addition of a patch for Improved Close-faced Helmets to fix the "invisible dragon mask" glitch. Patches all were up to date when this profile's install was completed. DSR was updated as per STEP instructions with every mod change up until I determined the profile was "complete" and ready to play. Mods before 2013: Jswords is just the textures and meshes with Sharlikan's patch and CCOR integration. Omegared does not seem like to cause crashes from transitioning interior/exterior cells. Anything is possible, but someone would have to explain this one to me. I use Mod Organizer. I use SKSE's inbuilt patch, enboost, etc. All as per STEP instructions. I have not tried disabling mods and then moving out of the cave as I worry this will break things worse.

Nope. Just the lighting mods that F&L stipulates. I use ENBoost with "Effects" turned off in enbseries.ini Might be a rogue .ini setting or something. Any idea where I should look?

In exteriors, I seem to have "pop in" lighting effects where approaching within a certain range, or from a certain direction, will generate ugly black "shadows", usually in rectangular shapes, on the ground where shadows would be cast by plants, clutter, etc. I've seen this kind of thing before in Skyrim, and it was usually some error with ELFX or with my install. I think the culprit here is probably one of the handful of lighting mods F&L lists, but I'm hoping this sub's experience can point me in the right direction! Not sure what the issue is, but other than this my F&L install seems to be working like a charm! Thanks EssArrBee.

I tried a manual installation. Seemed to work but I've seen at least one tutorial pop up.

You mean "create a new folder, called 'More Perks.esm' and drag and drop the contents of the folder 'More Perks for Companions.esm' and then delete the 'More Perks for Companions.esm' folder... ???