Skyrim Suddenly Crashes When Saving Game Everytime

[Sarcasm]

Hi, I'm having a problem that is proving to be resilient. Honestly I'm at my wit's end trying to figure it out. 

 

I've been playing Skyrim for three days now, and the first two days were without problems. Today was going fine until recently. I hit level 20, clicked Health for level up, and instantly I am looking at my desktop. First CTD. Now, every single time I save in any way, console or menu, the game crashes instantly.

 

This is only true of games I saved today. My save games from yesterday seem to work fine, and I can save with them. Three hours of playtime today with no issues, and now all of those saves are tainted and crash when saving. It's like something went wrong and retroactively broke everything I did today. I have no idea what happened, how it infected everything else I did today, and why nothing from previous days was affected.

 

My load order is fairly massive, with about 250 plugins. It's proving impossible to diagnose what mod is causing the problem because I am using Requiem, which requires about 30 compatibility patch plugins. Disabling any major mod requires me to deactivate a patch, and then all my Skyproc Patches are unusable. I thought I had nailed the issue down to Immersive Patrols, but when I reassembled my game and repatched, it was back.

 

I ran Save Game Script Cleaner and every option turned up with 0 problems and 0 scripts deleted.

 

Papyrus Logs are extensive with a massive amount of errors and missing things. I'm not sure what that is all about. The vast majority of them relate to XPMSE, which is strange since I only use it for back swords and hip daggers. The script errors may be important.

 

My load order is so huge and interconnected that I'm not sure it's worth posting, but I can if anyone thinks that will help.

 

I hope someone will have a suggestion. I could just resume from yesterday's saves that work, but with the problem unresolved today there's absolutely no way of knowing whether it will just appear again in the future.

[Sarcasm]

I seem to have figured this out. The crashes are caused by a single plugin, a mod that I actually made myself. It's a merge of many different armors and a few weapons. Not sure what I did, but I must have become lazy and made a mistake somewhere. Very, very strange that some armors can cripple a game in this way, but such are the mysteries of Skyrim. Now that I think this is over, I will mark it solved. Thanks to everyone who responded here!

[DMCbr]

I have this problems for months now... I took a break of Skyrim because is umplayable with step extended+my 100 mods. Did you noticed when you open the save cleaner that it show some msg saying you have a high number of active scripts? Mine are always around 2k-10k scripts running, and this is the cause of constant CTD and save corruptions for me.

Also, whats causing this is animations! Sexy move, XP extended esqueleton, and all other animations i use. When i get a better PC i will play again, because now is impossible.

[Nebulous112]

You may have exceeded the string limit. Not sure.

 

Try using Crash Fixes, along with the SKSE Plugin Preloader. You will have to change the value of "UseOSAllocators" from "=0" to "=1" in the crash fixes INI. Also make sure that "ExpandSystemMemoryX64" =false in enblocal.ini. More info including installation info on the Crash Fixes and SKSE Plugin Preloader pages.

 

You will probably have to load an older save from before you hit the string limit, though. But it should prevent you from future issues with it.

 

Of course, all this is assuming that that IS the issue.

[DMCbr]

I use that, both :D

Also i keep a save inside Alternate Start cell, to load before my main save. The game fails to load the main save 90% of time.

I think my only problem is the excessive number of animations. The crash fixes informs that everytime the game CTD, also it informs about broken textures with torches, but the game dont CTD with any torch (maybe a false warning?)

 

Dunno about Sarcasm problem source, there's so many causes.

Last time i modded the game i had 407 mods on left tab, lots of merged plugins to reduce the right tab count to <230, and this weak laptop that fails on me...  XD

 

Sorry, i'm not helping much with the question this way :p

[ram911]

I had a similar issue as sarcasm that does not seem to rear it's ugly head until you have progressed within the game, in my case it was level 13. Throughout the play thru there was no indication the game was going to take a dump - (Memory, Default Heap, FPS, String count) all seemed solid as a rock, and the game was very enjoyable. 

 

Until making a save through the menu and CTD. All saves that day allowed a load but not a save. After some serious searching (2 weeks) for a solution I ran into this post 

 

      "https://www.loverslab.com/topic/46913-how-to-debug-ctd/page-1".

 

It did not solve my issue but I think it was worth the read thru as a few of the posters were involved in this conversation 

 

      "https://www.loverslab.com/topic/56588-corrupted-saves/" 

 

involving the issue of the corrupted saves as we are describing here. Although my string count seemed fine there was a problem that I could not pin point but it seemed that many of the mods with the highest number of string counts were in my load order and although we know how to look at a save and determine the string count to that point, we still do not know the string count while running the game and whether or not it fluctuates. 

 

My final last ditch effort led from the post above to this post regarding a tool to analyse the mods and make a patch to reduce the string count of those mods.

 

      https://www.loverslab.com/topic/61279-restringer/

 

I used it for a mod called Anna's NPC's which had a very high string count and as I indicated in my post on step I felt was causing me issue's but did not know why. Restarted the game from the earlier save in the Four Shields Tavern and have been playing for 2 weeks straight with out one CTD during a save. I am now at level 20 and loving every minute of a game I have played many times already.

 

I do not know if it will help your case, but it may be worth the effort to test it out. Since that time I have done several mods within my load order and I believe I am the most stable I have ever been with my load order and hardware. (I miss the day's of Step Extended).  

[mikegray]

[....]

I hope someone will have a suggestion. I could just resume from yesterday's saves that work, but with the problem unresolved today there's absolutely no way of knowing whether it will just appear again in the future.

 

I HATE that one.

 

- In my case, XPMSE seemed like an early culprit. I didn't have pap logs on, but it was also opening crazy numbers of scripts. It also turned out to be a red herring. Apparently, XPMSE just does that, and - also apparently - it's not really a problem - even if it bugs the heck out of me.

 

- Have you tried the old player.kill trick? (Details in the second post here: https://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/615805-the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/65664399) When I've had that bug, it has never provided a long-term fix, but it HAS provided proof that I can still actually make saves.

 

- To get a meaningful diagnosis, load up your game with half your load order deactivated and see if you can make a save. If you CAN'T save, reduce by half again and try again. If you CAN save, erase the test save, add in half of the leftovers and try again. Keep on going until you identify a single mod that causes the crash if activated. 

 

- THEN activate all the rest of your plugins except for that one plugin AND all the plugins that depend on it. (Which, in these days of everything being patched to work with everything else may be quite a few!) See if you can still make a test save. If you can, nice. However, there's a decent chance you won't be able to. If this is the case, go back to dividing and conquering until you find a SECOND problem plugin. Keep on going until you can load with everything activated but the "problem children."

 

- At this point, there's a decent chance that you can get your savegame back on track by using the mod editor function in Save Cleaner to whack all the active forms and scripts in the mod(s) in question, load up your save with everything else, wait for a while somewhere safe, make a new save, exit. Then re-activate your trouble-makers and see if you're good to go.

 

- Last time I had this bug, it turned out to be a snafu between iNeed and CACO. After re-installing them, everything was fine and stayed that way.

[maedrhos]

Sarcasm: there is good advice here. Understand that the problems could be one of many. String count is a big problem for load orders that large and wasn't identified until earlier this year. Crash Fixes makes that particular problem go away. But it doesn't eliminate all potential problems. Following a guide like Neovalen's for Skyrim Revisited: Legendary Edition will eliminate a lot of mod incompatibility but you'll sacrifice some personalization of the game for stability. I still have the same recurring issue as you mentioned every 20 hours of game play where I'm unable to save the game. For me the "player.kill" method does work: https://www.gamefaqs....skyrim/65664399 (second post) although I've been unsuccessful in getting any advice on why it works, or what is causing the crashes in the first place. My sense is that it is still a misunderstood problem in the game and could well be caused by things I've added on top of the SR:LE build. Sorry to not be more specific but you may find modding to be frustrating in that there can be a lot of time spent making the game work rather than playing it.

[Sarcasm]

Thanks for these responses ! I've been exploring the answers here for a while now.

 

I've never even heard of string count before, that is new to me. Assuming Skyrim Save Editor is accurate, my current crashing save file has 52,300 strings. A brand new save has 43,930 strings. The post ram911 linked shows 65,535 is the maximum, so is this not the problem? The number doesn't seem to be exceptionally high, but someone who knows more can tell me. I do, however, have many script instances (157,983). Should I try dropping mods like Interesting NPCs? That would be a shame, it was one of the main reasons I wanted to play again.

 

I had no idea animations could even affect game stability. Well then! I have quite a few weapon and magic animations installed, just about every normal animation is replaced.

 

ram911, I think your post is particularly interesting since you seem to have about the same problem as I have. I've read through all the posts you linked, and it seems I may have to start over after dropping a few big mods. I've tried to be very careful on installing script-y mods since script lag has been a problem in the past, even dropping a few from STEP Extended such as Hearthfire Extended and Come Together & Out of the Way because they were motherloads of scripts and weren't substantial enough to keep. However there are a few mods like Interesting NPCs that I truly wanted to keep. I'm going to try out the Restringer now, I hope this is the holy messiah! I think I am going to restart completely after trying it out and dropping some script mods.

 

Another question I have is whether inactive mods in Mod Organizer count for anything. I have almost 700 mod folders, a lot of them just leftover proc patches from various testing profiles, but only ~350 of them are active. Should I clean up the rest?

 

Going to try player.kill now. There's a lot for me to do and I will report back once I've tried everything in this thread, I thank you all for such extensive responses so far.

 

edit: also, should I run Restringer through Mod Organizer?

 

Okay so I'll admit I don't know how to use Restringer. Every time I try to set my Mod Organizer directory or load any mod from it, it says it is not a Mod Organizer folder.

Edited June 19, 2016 by Sarcasm

[Greg]

Offhand, I think inactive mods should not have any impact on performance with Mod Organizer since the game doesn't even know these mods or files exist.

[Sarcasm]

Thanks, I thought so but wanted to be certain. I did figure out Restringer, it looks like it dislikes being run through Mod Organizer.

[Sarcasm]

I wish the edit function wore off more slowly! So much to do and so many questions now. For now, I'm curious about Restringer. It says it only works with "endpoint" mods that have no dependencies and dependents. Does this mean that using a compatibility patch with a mod makes it un-Restringable ? For instance, Moon and Star is independent with nothing relying on it. But, it requires a compatibility patch for Requiem. Does that patch mean this mod cannot be used with Restringer now?

[Nebulous112]

I haven't used it, but from the language you posted I would say it is likely that Moon and Star cannot be used with the Restringer.

 

Check the Requiem compatability patch you mention and see if it lists Moon and Star as a master. A quick way to check if you are using MO is to install it, and hover over the plugin in the right pane. It will list the masters. If Moon and Star is one of the masters, then from that language I don't believe it can be used with this Restringer.

[Sarcasm]

I've been playing around with string count quite a bit in the past day. I still don't think this is my problem, though. It seems that the limit is 65,535, but I never even came close to that. My most recent save was 52,300. Are there other string-related issues besides hitting the limit?

 

Also, is it a real thing that animations can contribute to game instability?

[Nebulous112]

I honestly don't know. I imagine that animations could contribute to instability if there was any sort of conflict. FNIS is supposed to handle that, but again, I really don't know enough about it to offer any specialized advice.