General stability tips?

[Mud]

So while adding mods and graphical improvements and whatnot, my game's become gradually more unstable, as it often does, especially since I have something like 240 ESP/ESMs. My game has a tendency to freeze in cities when too many beautified NPCs are gathered in one place, and entering and exiting buildings can randomly result in infinite loading screens or crashes, and certain areas like Ivarstead are for some reason heavily unstable if I stay outdoors for too long. So I'd like to ask anybody who can share some nuggets of wisdom, what are steps I can take to maximize my game's stability while running all these mods? Ini edits? Folder cleanup? Infamously unstable mods I would do well to avoid? Stuff like that?

[cornbreadtm]

Here's a page of Ini tweaks. http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=354301

 

You can change your load and memory settings in you skyrim & Pref inis until you regain your stability. Cell buffering, backgroundloading and threading helps a lot.

 

S.T.E.P has some ini tweaks as well. iLargeIntRefCount=262144. This stops you from crashing on interior loads but since you said exteriors where you problem try the link I gave you.

 

Warning: Never change this, (uGridsToLoad=) unless you want to start a new game cause it can harm your save. Stay away from uGridsToLoad=

 

Anything else you change can be reset or changed again till you find what's right for your system.

 

You going to have to give your loadorder if you want help on unstable mods.

[Mud]

Thanks, I think it's increased stability by a little bit, although I think that LargeIntRefCount setting was actually causing more interior load problems than it was preventing. Suddenly had problems entering barrow ruins.

 

Now, might anybody have tips for improving my ability to have beautified NPCs in the vicinity? I'm using the Inhabitants of Skyrim NPC overhaul, and also carting around a party of four followers, but I have to order my followers to wait before entering populated areas or the game freezes from loading too many NPCs with fancy hair, it seems. And sometimes I load forever when entering a city, even without followers. Do I have any options other than simply removing mods or using fewer followers?

[galuf36]

You might have to.

 

I've got a pretty high-end computer (Quad-core, 16 GB Ram, 2 crossfired 7950 GPUs). I've installed S.T.E.P. to the max as well as TBBP, Turbosnowy's mods and others. I may have a few textures under 2048 but most are the 2048 or 4096 variety (even have some 8192 textures).

 

Problem is that my RAM will get up to 3101MB and when I try to go into another exterior cell or building the game will crash. I've done some looking and as soon as you approach 3.1GB of RAM, Skyrim gets very unstable. VRAM still is about 2.9GB so that definately isn't my problem (2 3GB video cards).

 

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/6491 <-- Try this. It's a tool called the Skyrim Preformance Monitor. If your RAM usage is anything like mine, you likely have the same problem I have. If not it could just be conflicting mods.

[Mud]

I don't think memory usage is part of the instability, I don't even get that high. According to the MemInfo mod, I generally float around 1500-1800MB when everything is stable, and around 2000MB in areas like Ivarstead where my game is mysteriously getting a lot of strain. When my game loads forever, I can see the RAM usage pause forever at 1600-1800MB. And there's no spikes when I encounter a sudden freeze, either.

[moomore]

I'm curious as to what OS you're using. Also, have you cleaned your mods with TESVEDIT? Finally, ATTK if you dont' already use it.

[dwjlien]

Just to nip in while information is being shared -

so it's a GOOD idea to do THREADED things then?/

I have The Skyrim Configurator and it has lots of tick boxes to let things be threaded.

I have a 4core 8gig Win7 machine, if it matters.

[Mud]

I'm on Windows 7 64bit. I use ATTK, but it doesn't seem to help with the infinite loading and NPC freezes. Haven't used TESVEdit, because quite frankly I know nothing about it.

[moomore]

It's worth a try to clean your esm/esp files; if you've never used TESVEDIT, there's a very good chance you have dirty mods. Using TESVEDIT was the final nail in the coffin to stabilize my Skyrim short of mod conflicts.

 

He's very methodical and meticulous about doing it so this video is a great visual guide. I believe he does the process 2 times so you really only need to watch half of it.

 

Anyway, I'll transcript that with the process I follow; it's pretty much what the video does so be prepared for repetitive. My friend taught it to me and it's the most simplified way to go about this.

 

1. Use BOSS and let it sort out your mods. When finished, keep the resulting BOSS page open, we need that. We're interested in the recognized mods tab where it shows the final list. You'll see warnings like {{BASH: Delev, Relev}} but we don't care about those.

2. We are interested in any mods that have this under it:

"Contains dirty edits: 1 ITM, 0 UDR records. Needs TES5Edit cleaning. A cleaning guide is available here."

 

3. Any mods that have numbers before ITM or UDR need to be cleaned; make note of them but there's no need to memorize.

4. Download TESVEDIT . As of now, I am still on the 1.8 version of Skyrim and therefore am ignorant of 1.9 changes.

5. Run TESVEDIT; if that dosen't work, throw TES5EDIT.exe and the "file that tells you not to delete it" into the skyrim folder where your ENBs go.

6. When running TESVEDIT, checkmark any mods you're using. Some mods are incompatible; the ones I've run into are java ones like ASIS and Automatic Variants. You will need to uncheckmark mods like those or you'll get an error. You'll know it's a mod conflict if TESVEDIT refuses to proceed.

7. After the lengthy load time, right click somewhere in the left box and click "Apply filter for cleaning" It should be fourth from the top.

8. After another lengthy load time, we can begin to clean. Refer back to the BOSS log to know which mods to clean.

9. If a mod has any number of ITMs, right click the mod in the left box of TESVEDIt. Then click on "Remove 'Identical to Master' records" about eleventh down from the top. The first time you do this, TESVEDIT will ask if you're absolutely sure and yes, we're sure because BOSS tells us so.

10. Next, if the mod has any number UDRs, we right click the mod and select "Undelete and Disable References" tenth down from the top. It goes without saying that if the mods does not have any ITMs or UDRs indicated by BOSS, don't do anything to said mod.

11. Repeat the process for every mod listed by BOSS that requires cleaning. Once you're done, close it; TESVEDIT will ask to backup changes and it's up to you from there.

 

I actually know very little about TESVEDIT myself but I can still do this. Supposedly, the proper way to clean mods is to do it one mod per TESEDIT session but I do it all at once because I'm lazy.

 

On the idea of threading, I personally checked every threaded option I could. Skyrim is notoriously bad at even making use of the second CPU core, so even if you're able to offload some calculations to the extra cores, you're better off having done it.

[medic975]

I had tons of CTDs and Infinite load times using full S.T.E.P. I have a decent machine. 660ti 2g, 4 core i5 3.3, ssd, 16g of RAM, (not that it matters for Skyrim), I dropped down a lot of my 4k and 2k textures. Mostly on clutter objects and trees. Some with the Shadow quality. Game still looks beautiful and is much much more stable. Occasionally will get a crash or infinite load.

 

I can personally back up Cornbread's mention to never ever touch ugrids. I raised my to 7 CTD city. drop it back down to 5. Stability.