Help - Exterior World Space Freezes and CTDs

[MadWizard25]

I get CTDs and freezes in Exterior World spaces quite often, and it is becoming a major irritant. The freezes are total; i have to ctrl+alt+delete TESV.exe to exit Skyrim, and the CTDs are CTDs without any warning. This only occurs in world spaces, i.e. outdoors, wilderness, etc. My experience with oblivion tells me this is a mesh issue usually, but disabling mesh mods does not seem to fix the issue for me. Before i launch into frantic troubleshooting mode I was hoping if anybody else had experienced this issue? Any help or ideas would be appreciated, as i desperately try to avoid disabling mods one by one.

 

Additional Info:

- Only since latest patch

- Occurs with STEP setup, without any extra mods, vanilla is fine

- Occurs with or without texture optimization

- Occurs when trying out a new game

- Searched nexus, bethesda, and steam forums to no avail. plenty of people seem to have this issue? (in reality probably small minority)

- SoS sound mods do not cause it

- I occasionally hit 2GB VRAM allocation (use?), but using skyrim performance monitor shows that the crashes are not linked to hitting the VRAM ceiling

- Using gamebooster, steam offline, no overlay, all desktop notifications/ popups disabled, fully defragged

- Tried Papyrus and budgetcap ini tweaks

- Clearing all cells after 31 day wait, no effect

 

So if anybody has experienced this issue and/ or somehow fixed it, even if it was with one of the things i already tried above, i would grateful for any comments. Thanks!

 

Edit:

- Freezes and CTDs, occurring frequently, averaging ever 15/ 20 minutes.

- Default ini's, (uGrids=5) after other ini tweaks failed to fix the issue

- Verified game cache

 

Second Edit:

- fps booster did not help

- cpu core affinity did not work

- underclock did not work

[stoppingby4now]

 

Where did you find those instructions (or did you make them )!?  I'd very much like to post those on our wiki and of course I like to give credit where it's due.

took me about 15 minutes to write it up (did it myself too often...). of course there is the SIG but the problem is, that many people don't have a clean vanilla setup as backup in the first place. They come to this forum after a long way of modding their game without having heard anything about clean saves etc.

I myself have a really bad internet connection which makes validating any files by steam really really really annoying (internet mostly dies before it ran the validation). It's fairly easy to manually delete only those files that don't have anything to do with skyrim vanilla and then run a validation as check, whether or not some original files have been lost.

 

When the Wrye Bash guide was in Draft, I had added very similar instructions to it for getting to a clean state without having to re-download the very large BSA files. Not sure if it was changed or removed, but I agree these should be in the SIG.

[psychosteve]

hey,

 

after some few tests i can say that my freeze problem with magic and dragon is gone for good...but i still have some random freezes (not CTD) around the main world of Skyrim (not in cities or indoors)...so it's not 100% gone for good (yesterday i was on my horse and when i reached a bandit camp the game just froze...for no reason...i was just riding the horse that's all). My game is still pretty laggy anyway (even in medium settings)...i think my i7 with 6Go of ram is not enought for those skyrim's amazing advanced next gen 3D graphics ;)

 

after a good "vanilla clean" i reinstalled my mods one by one and used BOSS for the correct load order.

 

it's gonna take me some time but i will uninstall mod after mod to see which is messing up

[torminater]

you need at least 8 gb of ram for win 7 64 bit.

do the testing every single time after installing a mod (by load order or whatever.) that saves time and trial-error-failures.

[Farlo]

you need at least 8 gb of ram for win 7 64 bit.

Wat?

do the testing every single time after installing a mod (by load order or whatever.) that saves time and trial-error-failures.

Testing is needed with the final product as well, a lot of problems stem from the conflict between mods, not the mods themselves.

[bitdman]

Here's something strange. Maybe it will make sense to you.

I had a game that ran very well one day and and the next day would start fine indoors,but when I tried to leave it would just load and load and load. I ctrl,alt,delete out and taskmgr shows Skyrim not responding. After trying a few things I decided to store the save away for later and start over. 

 

I started a new game with "Alternate Start" Thank you Arthmoor! thank you. After I made my character I saved it. Then I loaded the save and chose which start I wanted and walked around a bit. Then decided to load the other save that I had moved from my last game(the one that wouldn't work) and it worked fine and I was able to play for about 5hrs before freezing as I started to cross the wood bridge to enter Whiterun.

 

Why would saving over a new game work when loading the same save and trying to play would not?

[frihyland]

There appears to occasionally be some bleed through of saves if you load a game from the start menu without fully exiting the game first. Its something I investigated when writing the troubleshooting guide, but it is far to random to actually recommend trying as a fix.

[torminater]

Well 4 gb are recommended for win7 64Bit to Run smoothly. Skyrim can/could use 4 gb RAM Too. So to ensure that everything can work As free As possible 8gb RAM are needed. Generally speaking it is always better Running more than the required specs. Of course there are uncountable different opinions. Just speaking of my Own experiences.

[stoppingby4now]

you need at least 8 gb of ram for win 7 64 bit.

do the testing every single time after installing a mod (by load order or whatever.) that saves time and trial-error-failures.

4GB is logically the bare minimum to run games on Win7 whether on x32 or x64, but in no way is 8GB a requirement. More is better when you are running several programs, and especially with the change in memory management brought about via Vista, it allows for a lot of your most commonly used programs to be pre-fetched into RAM for a faster start.

 

But, 6GB is plenty of RAM to play Skyrim. Just because the program has the LAA flag set, does not mean it will ever utilize a full 4GB. The main purpose of RAM usage for games is to pre-cache textures, and there isn't anywhere near that amount of data that needs to be cached.

Here's something strange. Maybe it will make sense to you.

I had a game that ran very well one day and and the next day would start fine indoors,but when I tried to leave it would just load and load and load. I ctrl,alt,delete out and taskmgr shows Skyrim not responding. After trying a few things I decided to store the save away for later and start over. 

 

I started a new game with "Alternate Start" Thank you Arthmoor! thank you. After I made my character I saved it. Then I loaded the save and chose which start I wanted and walked around a bit. Then decided to load the other save that I had moved from my last game(the one that wouldn't work) and it worked fine and I was able to play for about 5hrs before freezing as I started to cross the wood bridge to enter Whiterun.

 

Why would saving over a new game work when loading the same save and trying to play would not?

I've experienced the same thing on occasion. In some cases, I would have saves that would either not load at all (had to kill TESV.exe after 10 minutes), or would take a very long time. But, if I were to load my saved game just before character creation, then turn around and load the problematic save, it loaded just fine without any wait time.

 

In the above scenario, the process to load the problematic save by loading a clean one first worked 100% of the time. Still have no idea why.

[torminater]

Here's something strange. Maybe it will make sense to you.

I had a game that ran very well one day and and the next day would start fine indoors,but when I tried to leave it would just load and load and load. I ctrl,alt,delete out and taskmgr shows Skyrim not responding. After trying a few things I decided to store the save away for later and start over. 

 

I started a new game with "Alternate Start" Thank you Arthmoor! thank you. After I made my character I saved it. Then I loaded the save and chose which start I wanted and walked around a bit. Then decided to load the other save that I had moved from my last game(the one that wouldn't work) and it worked fine and I was able to play for about 5hrs before freezing as I started to cross the wood bridge to enter Whiterun.

 

Why would saving over a new game work when loading the same save and trying to play would not?

I've experienced the same thing on occasion. In some cases, I would have saves that would either not load at all (had to kill TESV.exe after 10 minutes), or would take a very long time. But, if I were to load my saved game just before character creation, then turn around and load the problematic save, it loaded just fine without any wait time.

 

In the above scenario, the process to load the problematic save by loading a clean one first worked 100% of the time. Still have no idea why.

 

Perhaps a form of savegame bloat? scripts not being run correctly/interrupted by saving and killing the process? scripts from old save still running although you're loading the new savegame? try to look at your papyrus protocolls!

[stoppingby4now]

Perhaps a form of savegame bloat? scripts not being run correctly/interrupted by saving and killing the process? scripts from old save still running although you're loading the new savegame? try to look at your papyrus protocolls!

 

Unfortunately, I do not have those problematic saves anymore (was a couple STEP versions back).

[torminater]

Maybe bitdman can do some testing?

[bitdman]

I will.  I also tried going to Whiterun again. I travel there by wagon,get off and start walking to the entrance near the stables. half way across the wood bridge Freeze!

 

What was that about papyrus protocols? Or save bloating?

[MadWizard25]

As of 1.6 I have removed any mod that is script heavy, has done wonders for my stability. To be fair I only had WARZONES, Occupy Skyrim, and SkyTEST that were script intensive. Removing these helped a lot with reducing freezes. Oddly enough, I also reduced freezes by removing WATER and Lush Grass and Lush Trees.

 

Save bloating should be much less of an issue as of the latest patch, especially if you run 1.05c beta USKP as well.

 

However, be warned that uninstalling these script heavy mods will leave orphan scripts behind in your save. Nothing can be done about it. Its really easy to corrupt your save game after uninstalling mods because of this problem. You can follow the save game cleaning guide on the wiki, and it may help a little, but you will never be able to fully get rid of all orphan scripts :(

[JudgmentJay]

I've started getting some freezes lately. I was using the STEP guide with 0 issues for about a week when they suddenly started. I have added a number of gameplay-related mods in the days after the initial STEP install, so it will be difficult to pinpoint the problem. I'm leaning towards Frostfall though. The freezes are pretty few and far between, but they seem to always occur after a loading screen when the game is autosaving. I updated my nVidia drivers from 304.48 to 304.79 in hopes that that fixes the issue. I don't really want to trial and error with mods. I'd hate to disable Frostfall... I really love that mod.

[torminater]

try to use the papyrus logging feature in your skyrim.ini, that might help to nail down the problem.