A terrible waste of time, effort and sanity.

[jeremiahizaiahta]

A strange and very non-specific title, I know. That is because this is a very strange issue I am having. I do not post this in technical support because I am not looking for support, simply a place to vent my frustrations unto and this happens to be what I've determined to be the most appropriate place.

 

It was roughly four days ago I decided I wanted to reinstall fallout 4 -- and what barbarian plays a bethesda game without mods? So, that's precisely what I did. I didn't even get terribly many, either - a grand total of 120 active mods, or so Vortex said. AAF and roughly half of a starter's guide to fallout 4 modding, plus the vital bits of the AAF Fucking Manual plus a number of the additional bits found in either. F4SE was installed of course, so was FO4 Edit. I remember I got ENB too, during my first installation of the game four days ago, but I (wrongly) suspected that's where my troubles began.

 

You see, a number of AAF Fucking Manual's mods don't work without DLC. It could even be said that most fallout 4 mods on Nexus don't work without DLC. The problem is, until about two days ago, I didn't have the DLC. I admit I knew that much already, and I skipped over the mods that said they explicitly needed DLC to function -- but boy, is that issue more invasive than I thought.

 

So, I'm about two hours into my game. AAF Violate's working just fine, had some troubles with scene init. status 4 earlier but I got all that sorted out, got some asshole triggerman to surrender and had some fun. Works fine. And then a second surrenders, and thats where it all goes to shit. I really should've cut my losses and ran at this point, but I'm a stubborn, persistent idiot when it comes to getting my fill and I really wanted to know why my game was vehemently refusing to play any animation. I ended up restarting the game six times at least, checking AAF's admin console every time.

 

The problem was in DLC. It claimed it was missing the DLCs. Three of them, I think it was Nuka World, Far Harbor and something else. So, being the impatient, stubborn, persistent moron I am, I just up and got all of them. Of course, this meant that I could get a bunch of mods I couldn't before, either! Plenty of mods - up to two hundred and twenty five this time, after getting the DLC. My 2012 GTX 680 can run minecraft with shaders and battlefield five just fine plus war thunder on cinematic settings and in all cases my biggest and only problems there would be internet connection, it should have no trouble with Bethesda's most mediocre title.

 

It was after launching the game at this point that Fallout 4 refused to start a new game. I could not use the old one, It'd been deleted already because I had added and removed so many mods that it would've been corrupted anyway. I'd click 'start new game', it'd start loading and enter a black screen with that sort of radar-ish loading icon in the bottom right corner. Maybe fifteen to twenty seconds later, it would - and without fail - crash to the desktop.

 

I must've tried three, four, maybe five times before simply giving up and deciding to cut out mods, start consulting forums for aid. Other people had similar problems, so I'd followed advice in those threads.

-Check whether or not modding was possible at all here? Yeah, I changed the Fallout4Custom files.

-Is F4SE installed properly? Yeah, double and triple checked.

-Try removing all mods and then gradually reinstalling them? Yeah, that worked up until a point. It was an entirely random point each of the three times I tried it, without a single overlap in installed mods.

-Update your graphics driver? I've got that three times this month already, four times now. No dice.

And I've tried so many more things beside that. None of the fixes I could find online worked. I've been messing around in my computer files for what must be twenty hours now and I've lobotomized my game so many times and revalidated the files through steam and reinstalled Fallout 4 so many times that I could probably manually reinstall F4SE blindfolded.

 

As I post this, I'm probably opening windows control panel and just uninstalling the game outright, plus Vortex Mod Manager. I don't know if I'm going to try again tomorrow, but its still got the same problem. This last time, I didn't even have any mods installed and it still crashed upon trying to load a new save - and thats after reinstalling Fallout 4 for the third time since getting the DLC.

 

I do not want any technical support but if you want to try and figure out the issue for yourselves you are welcome to. For now, I'm just going to go read a book instead - Flowers for Algernon was supposed to be good, right? Maybe I'll try skyrim again instead tomorrow. That at least doesn't have troubles with bullshit-useless DLC.

 

This has been a spectacular waste of time, effort and sanity. I bid you all good night, and I bid todd howard to kiss my pasty white ass.

[Sgt. Marge]

I understand your frustration.  If you end up trying to mod again in the future I can offer you a couple pieces of advice, some of which it seems you were already following to a degree.  This advice would also apply to other Bethesda titles, Dovahkiin.

 

- Make sure game is not installed in a protected directory, start game and mod manager as admin, add exceptions to the exe's and processes to antivirus if needed (sometimes real time protection makes the game take a long long time to start, you can disable RTP and test if that's happening before adding exceptions).  "Program Files" is a protected directory for Windows, so make a different folder at the root of your hard drive and tell Steam to use it instead for the install.

 

- Start with a solid mod base, no more than 10-15 mods, and test the game.  Go through to concord and rescue Preston.  If the game is solid through there, and you don't have any problems saving it etc.  then add a few more at a time.  Edit:  In the solid base you will want things such as the unofficial patch, Baka Scrapheap, Buffout 4 (See this document if using both Baka and Buffout.  It indicates to turn buffout's memory manager off and change baka to ScrapHeapMult = 4), Canary Save File Monitor and other game / engine fixes and of course F4SE. 

 

- With each group of mods you add, delete your previous saves.  The easy way to start is with the mod Start Me Up so that you can skip the vault scene.  You can just enable the unofficial patch and that mod, and make a save with it, store that save in a separate folder.  This is because it's best to enable mods only after getting through the vault and outside.  So after you test, delete your saves and copy your first "clean unmodded" save over into the saves folder, enable your next group of mods and test again.

 

- With each mod you add, check through as many support posts as you can stomach, read all the descriptions, ensure you have all of the prerequisites and that the mod & prerequisites don't conflict with something you already have.  Unfortunately you can only catch issues with what's been reported by other people.  Occasionally you'll run into something unique if it's a lesser used mod.  But, if you are going slow, testing with each small group of mods you add, it will be easier to catch those issues. 

 

- Basic LL tips: Hit the Follow button on the mods download page for mods you are interested in, and you'll get direct links to new support issues in your inbox.  Hit the Get Support button to manually go into a mods support thread.  If you are having an issue and you've narrowed it down to a specific mod here, that's (usually) the best place to get support.  If it's specifically an AAF issue, they have a discord link in the Adult Setup Guide.  And of course for general technical questions, there's 2 different support forums as you've probably seen.

 

- Many people have issues when they start adding a bunch of mods all at once.  The main issue is that it's easy to miss something that way.  Take your time.  Keep testing.  It can take a week or more to get a really stable large quantity of mods set up if you are going without a guide of any kind.

 

- The easy route for modding is to follow something like the Beginners Guide, which lays out a large quantity of mods that have been tested by multiple people to work together.  I started with this, and then added / removed a few mods at a time until I got the experience I wanted.  This particular guide doesn't use LOOT, everything is done via install order.  So if you add a similar type mod, you can manually move it to the right area based on what you've already installed.  (Just be careful and get to know the mod manager and conflict section for files)

 

It's unfortunate that you ran into this issue with the DLC, it's not an uncommon problem and could be made more clear on some mod descriptions, I guess it's just assumed that people will have them but it's not always the case.  I hope that you find a game that will make you happy, and if you decide to mod again, there's lots of nice folks here that can help.

 

Cheers

[mircislav]

Also, wouldn't hurt before else, start the game trough Steam, set the initial game settings, play beyond character creation and at first save - quit. After that start modding the game.  

[jeremiahizaiahta]

7 hours ago, Marg597 said:

I understand your frustration.  If you end up trying to mod again in the future I can offer you a couple pieces of advice, some of which it seems you were already following to a degree.  This advice would also apply to other Bethesda titles, Dovahkiin.

 

- Make sure game is not installed in a protected directory, start game and mod manager as admin, add exceptions to the exe's and processes to antivirus if needed (sometimes real time protection makes the game take a long long time to start, you can disable RTP and test if that's happening before adding exceptions).  "Program Files" is a protected directory for Windows, so make a different folder at the root of your hard drive and tell Steam to use it instead for the install.

 

- Start with a solid mod base, no more than 10-15 mods, and test the game.  Go through to concord and rescue Preston.  If the game is solid through there, and you don't have any problems saving it etc.  then add a few more at a time.  Edit:  In the solid base you will want things such as the unofficial patch, Baka Scrapheap, Buffout 4 (See this document if using both Baka and Buffout.  It indicates to turn buffout's memory manager off and change baka to ScrapHeapMult = 4), Canary Save File Monitor and other game / engine fixes and of course F4SE. 

 

- With each group of mods you add, delete your previous saves.  The easy way to start is with the mod Start Me Up so that you can skip the vault scene.  You can just enable the unofficial patch and that mod, and make a save with it, store that save in a separate folder.  This is because it's best to enable mods only after getting through the vault and outside.  So after you test, delete your saves and copy your first "clean unmodded" save over into the saves folder, enable your next group of mods and test again.

 

- With each mod you add, check through as many support posts as you can stomach, read all the descriptions, ensure you have all of the prerequisites and that the mod & prerequisites don't conflict with something you already have.  Unfortunately you can only catch issues with what's been reported by other people.  Occasionally you'll run into something unique if it's a lesser used mod.  But, if you are going slow, testing with each small group of mods you add, it will be easier to catch those issues. 

 

- Basic LL tips: Hit the Follow button on the mods download page for mods you are interested in, and you'll get direct links to new support issues in your inbox.  Hit the Get Support button to manually go into a mods support thread.  If you are having an issue and you've narrowed it down to a specific mod here, that's (usually) the best place to get support.  If it's specifically an AAF issue, they have a discord link in the Adult Setup Guide.  And of course for general technical questions, there's 2 different support forums as you've probably seen.

 

- Many people have issues when they start adding a bunch of mods all at once.  The main issue is that it's easy to miss something that way.  Take your time.  Keep testing.  It can take a week or more to get a really stable large quantity of mods set up if you are going without a guide of any kind.

 

- The easy route for modding is to follow something like the Beginners Guide, which lays out a large quantity of mods that have been tested by multiple people to work together.  I started with this, and then added / removed a few mods at a time until I got the experience I wanted.  This particular guide doesn't use LOOT, everything is done via install order.  So if you add a similar type mod, you can manually move it to the right area based on what you've already installed.  (Just be careful and get to know the mod manager and conflict section for files)

 

It's unfortunate that you ran into this issue with the DLC, it's not an uncommon problem and could be made more clear on some mod descriptions, I guess it's just assumed that people will have them but it's not always the case.  I hope that you find a game that will make you happy, and if you decide to mod again, there's lots of nice folks here that can help.

 

Cheers

I think I should like to save this advice in a text file so that I can return to it whenever I next try to mod Fallout 4. Thank you kindly for the advice, it's much appreciated.

 

I'm pretty sure that Beginners Guide was actually what I was using to find most of the mods I had, I just didn't want to download the whole thing because many of the mods seemed unnecessary and, by that point, I'd already spent upwards of six hours waiting for all my mods to reinstall for the second time. I definitely had the foundation, preinstallation and F4SE categories installed properly but I considered everything after that to be strictly optional. The mods I downloaded from the guide didn't seem to conflict with eachother, and I didn't get any mods that the guide had said would've conflicted with other mods on the guide.

 

Maybe I went wrong with lobotomizing the guide like that before using it. Maybe it was that I didn't know Baka Scrapheap and Buffout 4 conflicted like that. Maybe it was something completely asinine as "Barber and Surgeon Camera Fix is conflicting with Player Comments and Head Tracking."

 

Regardless, thank you for the help. I think if I try to mod again, I'll be following this post to the letter.

[Cornoholio]

On 11/26/2021 at 3:55 PM, mircislav said:

Also, wouldn't hurt before else, start the game trough Steam, set the initial game settings, play beyond character creation and at first save - quit. After that start modding the game.  

So much this, that one has fucked me up so many times...

 

and then go step by step. Logical approaches are key, set up a working "chassis" before everything else. The whole "body, face and skin" complex is pretty much standalone, after a few basics like MCM, alternate start and the like, I tend to get that set up first. It doesn't have the potential to fuck up the rest, doesn't interact with the rest of the game mechanics, get a decent-looking char first, set up inside to outside: ZEX and FG first, then Bodyslide and preset, then the skin and face (the whole Looksmenu/LMCC thing), then 2k makeup and hair on top of it, teeth, lashes, tattoos. Once that works it will continue to do so and not really impact the rest of the game negatively, and adversely if it does not work correctly it stops all other efforts cold.

Then a few tweaks I usually use, and I get started on the whole "AAF" shebang: the manual helps. You always need to keep track of the orders, the different trees of dependencies.

 

It's really much more of a logical approach than TESV, more straight-lined and defined. If you keep good track of it it's bulletproof as a general setup, hardly any CTD results if you act with caution. If you fucked up it will more likely straight up refuse to run than crash when encountering an error and if it on the other hand does run it usually will do so continuously.