Please Help, Game CTD's when encountering a certain NPC on the way to Whiterun

[LuciferButtSex]

Okay, I'm going to try to make this brief, and I really hope someone is willing to help me on this one because I have about a 50/50 average for anyone actually responding to my posts (I'm not complaining, most of the other stuff I figured out on my own. But this one really has me stumped and I'm ready to just give up all together if I can't get it fixed, keep in mind I am rather new to modding, so pardon if I seem like a complete noob). I don't know what mod is causing my issue so I'm just going to explain what happens, hoping one of the mods I mention gives someone an idea as to what might be going wrong.

 

I have Alternate Start so I've been testing my mods inside the dungeon and so far I've gotten them all to work properly after some troubleshooting. Some of the mods that weren't working right immediately but currently are include Devious Devices (Assets, Integration, Expansion) and Devious Equipment, Defeat, and ZaZ Animation Pack. I have been testing them out, letting my character get sexually assaulted in the dungeon by the ghosts (I chose to escape from that prison cell after I talked to Mara). All has gone fine and has worked well. I escaped the prison, killed all 3 guard ghosts (and took the coin back they stole from me after an assault), pretty much looted the whole place and escaped through the sewer grate in the one cell. The first time I got out I was immediately captured by a vampire (I have Deviously Helpless and thought it would be fun to escape the prison cell wearing rusty bondage chains, so I have the whole harness plus rusty chain nipple rings and those painful looking iron chain pears, again rusty) and I followed the path towards Whiterun, there's a black mage encampment right next to the bridge where I came out of the sewer, the moment I approached it I heard a mage yell "You there! Halt!" (I'm paraphrasing). So I restarted the whole thing, except this time I waited until 7 am to emerge from the sewer. I approached the mage camp to test it, killed the black mage hanging out outside of the perimeter and took the mages advice in the sentry tower and left after that (I don't know if that place is a quest objective, plus the real test is walking around Whiterun). 

 

After this I continued down the road and came across a bandit toll bridge. At first I paid the toll, then decided I wanted my money back so I attacked them, got raped a bunch but eventually emerged victorious. So I began making my way to Whiterun again, the whole time trying too pick the lock to my rusty gag ring and failing. Along the path, right when Whiterun becomes visible in the background, there are 2 wolves that I killed. Immediately after those wolves is an NPC standing over 2 dead bodies, they are glowing blue (so I'm assuming a mage), it's at this NPC where my game CTD's. I tried saving it right before the NPC, I tried cleaning my mods, nothing works. I did install TES5Edit, though I have no idea what I'm doing with it. I could follow the guides to clean every single mod, but I have to do that 1 at a time and I'm hoping that I can resolve this without going through all that hassle. Perhaps it's a quest NPC and because I haven't started the DB quest the game just doesn't know what to do and says, "fuck it, this dumbass has me too confused... ah! I got it! CTD"

 

Sorry if it's tldr

[myuhinny]

Might be a skeleton issue either a skeleton body or outfit that requires a specific skeleton and if it's missing when you enter a cell of someone that has a skeleton issue it'll cause the game to CTD. You could try reinstalling your skeleton mod and see if that fixes it. If not you can try to load the game and open the console with the ~ key and type in TFC which will make the player go into TFC mode. In this mode fly over the one that is causing the CTD and open the console and click them and type in disable and hit enter this'll remove them for a little while from the game till the cell gets reset.

[Grey Cloud]

The obvious question is do you have any idea of the mod spawning the NPC?

 

I'm not quite getting where you are when this happens. You say 'path' which doesn't ring any bells with me.

[travelmedic]

57 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

The obvious question is do you have any idea of the mod spawning the NPC?

 

I'm not quite getting where you are when this happens. You say 'path' which doesn't ring any bells with me.

I'm thinking he's on the road just across the bridge from the Honningbrew Meadery.  If you had left the meadery and crossed the bridge, the road there curves up to the left and then right before going to Valtheim Towers.  Near the turnoff to the overlook where the blind bandit with the blank book is, there is a random spawn point, and I think that's what he's talking about.

 

I've never experienced any crashes in that particular area myself that I can recall.

[LuciferButtSex]

3 hours ago, myuhinny said:

Might be a skeleton issue either a skeleton body or outfit that requires a specific skeleton and if it's missing when you enter a cell of someone that has a skeleton issue it'll cause the game to CTD. You could try reinstalling your skeleton mod and see if that fixes it. If not you can try to load the game and open the console with the ~ key and type in TFC which will make the player go into TFC mode. In this mode fly over the one that is causing the CTD and open the console and click them and type in disable and hit enter this'll remove them for a little while from the game till the cell gets reset.

So I reinstalled XP32, both the base and the extended. I was able to approach the NPC, but then my game froze instantly. I'm gonna try TFC mode. I don't want to remove the NPC from the game right away unless I absolutely have to. I did install a couple of crash fixing mods, the main one is Load Game CTD Fix (this because my heavily modded game just kept CTDing while trying to load a save game, the mod fixed it perfectly), the second is Crash Fixes (this one because after reinstalling XP32 I got stuck on the load screen whenever I tried to load back into my save, that also was able to get me into the game.)

 

Now whenever I hit continue I get a message that reads....

'Warning: SKSE memory fix is not active on your game! Make sure "Data/SKSE/SKSE.ini" has DefaultHeapInitialAllocMB=786 or higher under [Memory]. If using Mod Organizer try adding - forcesteamloader to SKSE startup options. You can diable (I assume it's supposed to say 'disable') this warning from "Data/SKSE/Plugins/CrashFixPlugin.ini" by setting WarnSKSEMemoryPatch" to 0

 

I'm assuming it's not a good idea to just turn the warning off as instructed as opposed to trying to fix it. However for all I know it could be absolutely nothing, I honestly have no idea. But I would like thoughts on that as well if any.

 

 

Edit: So now it's not letting me approach again, in fact the moment I see the NPC my game will CTD if I hit the ESC key. This is getting beyond frustrating, I had thought at least I made some progress.

[LuciferButtSex]

1 hour ago, travelmedic said:

I'm thinking he's on the road just across the bridge from the Honningbrew Meadery.  If you had left the meadery and crossed the bridge, the road there curves up to the left and then right before going to Valtheim Towers.  Near the turnoff to the overlook where the blind bandit with the blank book is, there is a random spawn point, and I think that's what he's talking about.

 

I've never experienced any crashes in that particular area myself that I can recall.

Yup, I'm approaching Whiterun from Valtheim Towers, that's where I had my kinky run in with the bandits. I thought for certain that since that went smoothly I was good to just continue playing the game without having to spend days troubleshooting again. Fast forward to 5 minutes later...

[LuciferButtSex]

Also, thank you all for the replies!

[LuciferButtSex]

2 hours ago, Grey Cloud said:

The obvious question is do you have any idea of the mod spawning the NPC?

Not a clue, if I did I'd be troubleshooting on that mod

 

Edit: Based on what I've learned thanks to Myuhinny's suggestion, I'm fairly certain that it's something to do with Alternative Start

[LuciferButtSex]

Okay, last reply until someone else replies, I promise lol. I opened the console and typed 'TFC' and disabled the NPC. What I learned was that there are 6 NPCs, the living one is a scavenger, the dead ones are all either Imperial Soldiers or StormCloaks. So I have a feeling like this is an issue with Alternative Start itself, I did read somewhere about someone encountering SC and Imperial battles well before they should have and it breaking the game (wish I could find that thread now). The thing is though that even after disabling all 6 NPC's my game still CTD'd once I approached the battle site. So I'm going to go ahead and try making a clean save after disabling then reloading in. If that works I'll make an edit to this reply (also if something changes after doing that), if not I'll leave this reply as is. Otherwise I'm gonna focus on troubleshooting that pesky warning I mentioned earlier until I get a response lol. Perhaps I just need to go way around any area where Stormcloaks and Imperials fought but weren't supposed to yet lol.

[travelmedic]

OK, three things jumped out at me...

 

First, do you have two skeleton mods installed?  Both XP32 and XPMSE?  You only need the one, go with XPMSE.  Depending on which mod manager you use or the order you installed them, you might want to uninstall both, and then re-install just XPMSE.

 

Second, for purposes of avoiding crashes, do you have ENBoost, or an ENB installed?  You can use ENBoost even if you don't use an ENB, and it will help conserve your video memory.  Don't use the old one on Nexus, go to Boris' ENB website and download the latest version there (the website can be a little hard to navigate, but it's there).  I don't use an ENB myself, but I always run with Crash Fixes and ENBoost all the time.

 

Finally, you do have SKSE installed, right?  Go to silverlock.org and get it if you don't, it's not on Nexus or LL.  You install it manually, but it's very easy and instructions are provided on the site.  I would not ignore that warning that you're getting.  If you don't have it, you may have a mod trying to call a function from SKSE, and that could be overloading your system and causing the crashes.

[LuciferButtSex]

42 minutes ago, travelmedic said:

OK, three things jumped out at me...

 

First, do you have two skeleton mods installed?  Both XP32 and XPMSE?  You only need the one, go with XPMSE.  Depending on which mod manager you use or the order you installed them, you might want to uninstall both, and then re-install just XPMSE.

 

Second, for purposes of avoiding crashes, do you have ENBoost, or an ENB installed?  You can use ENBoost even if you don't use an ENB, and it will help conserve your video memory.  Don't use the old one on Nexus, go to Boris' ENB website and download the latest version there (the website can be a little hard to navigate, but it's there).  I don't use an ENB myself, but I always run with Crash Fixes and ENBoost all the time.

 

Finally, you do have SKSE installed, right?  Go to silverlock.org and get it if you don't, it's not on Nexus or LL.  You install it manually, but it's very easy and instructions are provided on the site.  I would not ignore that warning that you're getting.  If you don't have it, you may have a mod trying to call a function from SKSE, and that could be overloading your system and causing the crashes.

I did have 2 installed now that I look at it. Probably because each was listed as a requirement to different mods I wanted, I always read the requirements and install all required mods first, though I'm not always sure what they do or what they may conflict with. So I'm sure I did both without realizing. Just unistalled both and reinstalled XPMSE. 

I'll get ENBoost, I'm pretty sure I don't have an ENB installed at all, but I'm getting one now that I've seen the RealVision one lol. I uninstalled my Crash Fixes and that got rid of the pesky warning message when I go to load a game. It must be conflicting with something, most likely Load Game CTD Fix, which I'm not getting rid of since before that mod my save game would load maybe 1 20th of the time. Now it never CTD's on the load screen, so far I haven't had it freeze on me after uninstalling Crash Fixes (hopefully ENBoost keeps it that way).

I most definitely have SKSE installed, I may be a bit noobish but I'm not that bad ?. I mean, I was at my first attempt at modding. I even tried installing it through Vortex, that failed pretty damn hard. Kept getting an error message saying "SKSE not installed" when I tried to boot up a modded game. This is my 3rd attempt at modding Oldrim in the last couple months. The other 2 I just uninstalled everything (good thing I keep the game and all mods on an external harddrive so it's easy to wipe it all clean without accidentally fucking up my pc....part of the reason I got the EHD, that and my internal harddrive is like 500 GB and I figured I would easily use that up with mods) and started over. After the 2nd time I decided to attempt modding SSE instead, it was in troubleshooting that when I figured out how to install SKSE properly and get it working through Vortex. But I realized that many of the mods I wanted weren't fully developed or were still kinda broken for SSE so I scrapped it and went back to Oldrim since this time I knew how to get them installed properly.

 

Honestly, now that I know that the reason for my CTD's was most likely running due to into the aftermath of a battle that should not have happened so early in the game I might just go around it. I was pretty much headed straight for Helgen anyways. Was just gonna stop off in Whiterun to sell the loot I took from those handsy bandits. 

[RW311]

In skyrim\data\skse should be a file named skse.ini and needs to have this for the memory patch this is what you get warnings about from crash fixes.

 

[Memory]
DefaultHeapInitialAllocMB=1024
ScrapHeapSizeMB=256

 

If you don't have any setting for this and didn't setup crash fixes to handle memory instead ( it does not take over memory management by default that is why it warns you)  then probably you are crashing just from hitting memory limit allowed by default game install which cannot run many mods at all without crashing.

 

[LuciferButtSex]

2 hours ago, RW311 said:

In skyrim\data\skse should be a file named skse.ini and needs to have this for the memory patch this is what you get warnings about from crash fixes.

 

[Memory]
DefaultHeapInitialAllocMB=1024
ScrapHeapSizeMB=256

 

If you don't have any setting for this and didn't setup crash fixes to handle memory instead ( it does not take over memory management by default that is why it warns you)  then probably you are crashing just from hitting memory limit allowed by default game install which cannot run many mods at all without crashing.

 

In the skyrim\data\skse all there is a folder titled Plugins and a file called '__folder_managed_by_vortex', that's after reinstalling Crash Fixes

[ritalmao]

You will never find a solution to this. I've had this problem since forever. What i recommend you to do is uninstall everything and start over. Download this clean Whiterun save and for every 10 mods you install, load that save in skyrim and walk around the whiterun inn, whiterun and whiterun exterior to make sure you dont crash. Eventually you will find which mod was causing the crash. Never install mods in bulk without testing at least whiterun exterior. 

 

[LuciferButtSex]

1 hour ago, ritalmao said:

You will never find a solution to this. I've had this problem since forever. What i recommend you to do is uninstall everything and start over. Download this clean Whiterun save and for every 10 mods you install, load that save in skyrim and walk around the whiterun inn, whiterun and whiterun exterior to make sure you dont crash. Eventually you will find which mod was causing the crash. Never install mods in bulk without testing at least whiterun exterior. 

 

You're absolutely right, I tried going around the initial scene. But every single time I got within like 3 miles of Whiterun, or any sort of populated area the game crashes. I'm glad you commented. It probably would have taken me another day or two to decide to start from scratch. Even then I'm not sure if I would have gained the wisdom to actually test it in a city. I thought fighting would have been good enough. This saves me a lot of work and who knows how many retries. 

[Grey Cloud]

Ignore what ritalmao said, he's an idiot.

 

Follow what has been said about Crash Fixes and ENBoost. Don't start messing about with an ENB preset until you get this problem sorted out. Incidentally, Crash Fixes does not conflict with anything. You obviously had Crash Fixes configured incorrectly.

 

This problem has nothing to do with Alt Start as Alt Start has nothing to do with that spawn point and scavengers are vanilla spawns.

 

 

 

 

[faky]

if you're using vortex there's a 75% chance you uninstalled or overwrote some files and bad things happened. next time keep in mind that xpmse is the newer version of xpms and works in any instances the older one would. next time you post in technical forum stick to describing just your issue, not your life story

 

check vortex directory for skse.ini and see if you have the values set there if it even uses it's own inis, if not then run a file search for skse.ini and change them there

 

ENBs can be graphically demanding but they come with some stability improvements that you can use even without any graphic alterations. your issue can be a bad mesh or a bad world altering mod. try starting a new game, doing coc elseweyr and spawning those npcs in there