Hi folks! I just wrapped up an 85 hour Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough and now I'm refreshed and ready to get back to modding. After a bit of work on my Skyrim backlog, I looked up and saw...

That's right, I've finally broken 1900 mods in my load order! I don't know if I'm exactly in the mood for a totally new playthrough, but I'm definitely overdue for a shakedown run. I want to make sure everything is running the way I intended, and if that fails I want to localize the issues so I can address them. I already have a list of deficiencies I know I need to tackle, but I'm sure there's plenty of stuff that I'm missing. 

Before we launch in to the game, we'll do a quick scan of our full size plugins just to see if I've forgotten to compact anything. Our final load order index is at EE, whichi s a bit higher than I like but not yet in the danger zone - so I won't be tackling any complex ESL operations. I just want to rule out any low hanging fruit before I put myself into a situation where I can't compact anything for a while.

As we saw in previous examinations of the mod stack, we have plenty of candidates. Out of 238 full sized plugins installed, there are 116 that can theoretically be compacted. However, as you can see below many of them are "foundational" mods that I'm not quite ready to attack yet. The reason for this isn't because they would break - xEdit is good about flowing down form ID changes - but rather that if (when) I install something that uses that file as a master, I'll need to redo the compacting job.

Ultimately I didn't decide to tackle anything during this round, though reviewing the list did remind me that I needed to go into Maximum Carnage and hide its skeleton files - they were breaking creature animations in Sexlab. While this will break some of the enhanced gore animations, that's more of an "invisible loss" compared to breaking Sexlab scenes. Similarly, we need to go into Dwemer Metal Glowmapped and hide its sphere centurion nif, since that causes the same problem.

With that cleanup completed, the next thing to do is to hop into the game roll a new character. We ultimately launched with 1,903 mods active after downloading a couple of last-minute additions that I almost forgot, notably Nvidia Reflex Support. I learned about this mod on the Fallout side and it gave a nice performance boost. It remains to be seen if it'll be as helpful with my much more ambitious Skyrim build, but I'll take every bit of extra power I can get  

And here we are in the Alternate Perspective startup room. Right away we got Vinfamy's new player questionnaire. This is a nice feature that helps customize the player experience for Dovehkiin's Infamy, but at some point I do need to push back its startup routine a bit. In general, the size of this playthrough means that I have too much content starting right at the beginning of the game; eventually I'm going to go through those various quests and events and have them start at least a little earlier. In some cases, they'll be starting significantly later, such as the starting event for Rigmor of Bruma. Once I have Beyond Skyrim Bruma installed, I'll want ROB to not begin until the player character has visited Bruma and completed a non-trivial amount of content from that mod.

I haven't rolled a Redguard in a while, though in doing so it reminds me that I need to finish integrating PJ's mod for darker skin tones. I keep dragging my feet on this because it'll require me to use a nif patcher which will not only be a lengthy process the first time around, but it's a process I'll need to periodically re-run when I add new content to the game.

Before we set up MCMs for this playthrough, we need to visit a couple of locations to make sure their landscape data isn't all screwed up. These are from Hunting In Skyrim (which replaced Hunterborn in this build) and I'm not expecting any big problems.

We've got some floaters and messed up geometry at the first hunting guild site, so we'll need to revisit that in the future for cleanup. These are probably third party mod conflicts, for example I'm pretty sure the floating head is from The Ruins. Interestingly, the first hunting guild site is set up in a way that it'll create interesting synergy with Sex Slaves' early quest content. I don't have SLSS installed yet, but its on my list of quests to eventually integrate. 

The next site was near the Creation Club farm. It looked fine, though I might do some fine examination in the free camera later. The main issue is that this is the second place I've been noticing messed up grass textures. This is almost certainly related to issues with the Complex Grass texture pack I recently installed, and I'm going to just dump that mod for now. My grass looked fine before.

The real problem is with the Rift hunting guild, which just crashes my game every time I approach it, and which doesn't generate a crash log. This can point to a screwed up nif or to some deeper engine level problem, but it looks like the shakedown cruise is on hold until I can get this exterior cell to load without crashing the game!

Looking at the sub-block, only exterior 3 is getting overwritten by other changes, and I think we can safely assume that we don't have a critical issue with the mod as downloaded; there's nothing in the bug section for HIS to suggest this is an OEM bug. One issue I found right away were some reverted top level cell data that might be a problem with scripted functions, and I fixed that. There are landscape and navmesh changes, but neither of them appear to be critical. So from here we need to reach out to the adjacent cells and see what they contain. 

Drilling down further didn't reveal any obvious red flags. We also don't have any high risk mods appearing to colocate with this area. 

A trip to the nearby TestFallForest cell loaded up fine, even if I ran into a mob of latex suited Devious Strikers. Next I tried teleporting to the corner of the sub-block, Tamriel 39, -27. That crashed out and once more failed to provide a crash log. So it seems that there's something in that sub-block that the game is choking on and dying. It might be something in HIS, but it also might be something from a previously installed mod that is just flying under the radar now. 

We'll wrap up for today at this point, though before I call it quits I'll be regenerating the LODs and the occlusion data just in case that's part of the problem. Tomorrow, we're going to start loading individual cells of this sub block into the Creation Kit to see if we can make it crash, and then from there try to nail down the potential sources of instability in that area. See you then!