imsoenthused

Many people experience huge performance differences between interior and exterior cells. Exterior will always run worse. With certain ENB profiles I've seen computers that stay at steady 60FPS interior drop as low as the mid 20s in some exteriors. I'm not trying to discourage you, but what you are at may simply be as good as it gets.

So, re-installing DynDOLOD didn't fix it, but I decided to take one last stab at it. I already knew something involving a windmill was messed up from inside of solitude being strange, then I stumbled across a waterfall out in the middle of nowhere that was also missing. So I looked for anything involving windmills and waterfalls, found the skymills and skyfalls mod, re-installed it, then re-installed DynDOLOD again, and it's all fixed. Seems the mod didn't download correctly the first time, which can happen when you receive your internet over phone lines that have been around since JFK was in office. I'm not sure why it installed instead of giving me an error, but I'm definitely glad to have it fixed. Thank you all for trying to help.

Unfortunately, I removed downloads as I finished installing them, for fear of running out of space on my game drive. So, looks like I probably have 3 days of downloading to look forward to. I'll load up a new game first, but I suspect one of the many downloads got truncated at some point but installed without giving an error.

Yes, they are all checked.

I'm running the recommended 1k and medium on everything, but I will try bumping that up and see if it fixes it. edit: No luck, it still just crashes directly to desktop if I get too close to the city. I suppose, for now, I can just manually disable it whenever I need to be in Solitude and turn it back on the rest of the time. I can't really think of anything else to do other than re-download all of STEP, which takes a LONG time for somebody stuck on rural DSL. The only issues I get when disabling it is the area right next to the market in solitude seems to be missing some massive meshes. There's a windmill blade spinning in the air attached to nothing, and a gap underneath it where you can fall through the map, but none of the NPCs or enterable buildings seem to have an issue. It seems to be the area right where the exit from solitude down to the docks is supposed to be located. I followed the STEP guide step by step the whole way, so I'm at a loss.

I can disable the DynDOLOD.esp file, and then I can fast travel or walk up to the gate normally, although when I enter the town, it's pretty strange, pools of water, missing objects, fire floating in the air. All I have installed is a clean STEP Extended installation, and the only issue I've come across before this was the witch in the cabin near Helgen not spawning. I disabled mods and then re-enabled them one at a time until I verified that DynDOLOD is the culprit. Anyone have any idea why this would be happening? Are there any of the other STEP Extended mods that specifically alter Solitude?