Precaching Grass taking 6+ hours ...?

[Noobsayer]

Hi all,

I followed the STEP guide for SE successfully, then added some town overhauls + Gray Cowl + Project AHO on top of it. I can't use the grass precache included with STEP because of this. So I read the guide to do it myself. I changed the inis as instructed (doublechecked), I ran the xEdit script to narrow down the worldspaces, I went off and did a bunch of stuff and just let it run.

That was 6 hours ago.

 What gives? MO2 still keeps trying to reopen the game if I manually close it, so it thinks it's still doing something. I have nothing related to grass precaching that I can see generated in my overwrite (I assume it does this as it goes?)

Things I checked:

• ini settings for Skyrim and for NGIO
• power settings on my computer (high performance, no sleep)
• ???

I did not roll back all the assets to SE from AE, just the "best of both worlds" version. Could that be the problem? Advise please.

[Mousetick]

How are you starting the game to run the precaching? Are you using the 'Precache Grass' plugin in MO2? MO2 > Tools > Tools Plugins > Precache Grass?

How are you 'manually closing' the game?

It's possible the game is crashing always at the same spot during the precaching and not making any more progress. If you're using the MO2 plugin, this will cause an infinite run/crash loop until you abort the precaching, by using the 'Abort' button in the dialog box that appears after the crash and before the MO2 plugin automatically restarts it. You have 8 seconds to click on the button.

If you're not familiar with the whole grass precaching process, do it at least once with a vanilla-like load order. Disable your town overhauls and new worldspaces mods like Gray Cowl and Projet AHO. Run the precaching to successful completion. Observe how it works, open the console while it runs in-game to watch its progress. Notice the *.cgid files it creates in MO2's overwrite folder. Notice the PrecacheGrass.txt file in the game's folder, you can look at its contents to track progress. Notice how the game may crash from time to time and the MO2 precaching plugin automatically restarts it, giving you an option to abort during 8 seconds.

To completely stop precaching and return the game to normal operation, remove the PrecacheGrass.txt file from the game's folder. Do this only if the precaching is stuck, or was interrupted previously and you want to restart from scratch. Otherwise leave it alone and let it finish properly - NGIO removes it automatically upon successful precaching completion.

Look at .Net Script Framework crash logs to troubleshoot repeating crashes that prevent any progress.

[Noobsayer]

Yes, I'm using the MO2 plugin as per the guide.  Tools > Precache Grass.

I'm assuming it shouldn't be constantly crashing and restarting, either? I went ahead and did the full downgrade and that's what it's doing now. Before, it never crashed, so to see if it had frozen I'd just gone to the exit button and closed it that way. M02 kept restarting it.

It's still not made a single file in the overwrite folder despite running for 10 or 15 minutes. It has no made a PrecacheGrass.txt in my game folder, either. I'll give it a try again with a vanilla load order -- just the vanilla .esms -- and see what happens. I was very careful to follow each step to the letter, though, and after realizing something was amiss I even went back and started at the beginning to make sure.

I appreciate the response.

[Noobsayer]

Update: It's still crashing almost immediately upon starting. The menu doesn't even load it's so fast.

Doing the "official files only" method. I have a decently beefy rig, so I dunno. I'm assuming this is still not what's supposed to be happening. It did create the PrecacheGrass.txt in there this time but it's empty.

EDIT: That might be because it crashes on startup when trying to launch the game normally. Hmm.

• Ran the downgrader
• Downgraded SKSE
• Running only official .esms + CC content

I guess I could try without CC content. Strange, since the game was running just fine, fully modded, before I decided to try to precache my own grass.

EDIT 2: Nopers, I can't even get the game to launch through the regular launcher, not through SKSE, via MO2. I CAN through just doubleclicking the .exe in the actual Skyrim folder though. WELP.

Edited July 9, 2022 by Noobsayer

[Mousetick]

You're on the right track. Fix your setup so that the game starts normally and runs successfully without NGIO. There is no point in trying to precache grass if the game fails to run on its own.

[Noobsayer]

50 minutes ago, Mousetick said:

You're on the right track. Fix your setup so that the game starts normally and runs successfully without NGIO. There is no point in trying to precache grass if the game fails to run on its own.

I guess I could try repeating the downgrade ... I just can't fathom why it worked fine heavily modded (I did extensive performance/stability testing with the mods I added on top of STEP), and runs OK from the game folder/Steam, but not through MO2 anymore.

[Mousetick]

When was the last time it worked fine and what has changed since then? Go back in time and retrace your steps. I don't know what has changed so I can't tell you how/what to fix.

Check the SKSE log(s) for clues. If it was working fine before you downgraded, and works no more afterwards, beware you need to downgrade SKSE, Address Library, but also any SKSE plugins you might be using that have separate versions for Skyrim 1.5.97 "SE" vs. 1.6.x "AE".

[urbonx]

Dude, you even fixed? I'm having this problem rn. It freaking hurt. 

[z929669]

11 hours ago, urbonx said:

Dude, you even fixed? I'm having this problem rn. It freaking hurt. 

Try killing any unnecessary GPU software processes using Windows Task Manager. I do this as a general practice when grass caching and using xLODGen or DynDOLOD. This vastly speeds up gen time on my system (AMD GPU. NVIDIA's will be different):

I use them at all times otherwise, but for LODGen and grass cache gen, only drivers are required. These other processes don't know how to behave with LODGen processes.

[urbonx]

On 8/29/2023 at 11:03 AM, z929669 said:

Try killing any unnecessary GPU software processes using Windows Task Manager. I do this as a general practice when grass caching and using xLODGen or DynDOLOD. This vastly speeds up gen time on my system (AMD GPU. NVIDIA's will be different):

I use them at all times otherwise, but for LODGen and grass cache gen, only drivers are required. These other processes don't know how to behave with LODGen processes.

Late response but seems like disabling solstheim from the grass fix the trouble. Maybe is a problem with my grass mod?

[DoubleYou]

Typically this means you have a cell in that worldspace that has been completely botched. Generally you can see the relative location by observing the cell coordinates where it stops being able to create grass cache via the console or the Precache.txt file or the last generated cgid filename.