Saves eventually stop loading

[Anunya]

When I'm doing a play-through, eventually get to a point where the game craps out when loading a save game. Basically this happens:

 

I load the game.

After a bit the audio from the game starts playing.

The game stays on a black screen.

 

Over time I've noticed that changing the mods I use out of the load order reduces or increases the time before I end up with the borked save, but it seems to happen in the end nonetheless.

 

I'm guessing it's save game bloat, but I'm not sure...

 

Are there any guides or advice for how to identify the mods that are causing this issue and/ or how to mitigate it? I walked away from Skyrim for a while, but I'm beginning to miss it and want to dive back in...

[Anunya]

Also, if there's a way to look at existing saves and understand whether they'll eventually end up in that state that would be super useful as well. Any ideas?

[yorpers]

2 hours ago, Anunya said:

I'm guessing it's save game bloat, but I'm not sure...

 

 

I don't know if save game bloat is even a thing with skse and SSE in its current state. You gotta try REALLY hard to bloat your saves that much and I'll be damned if I haven't tried and failed to do it.

 

On a more serious note you probably have never experienced actual save game bloat and what it actually was, was some sort of conflict or script error from some half complete mod.

 

As far as ideas to not experience that kind of frustration again...my advice is take things slow. Check your stability ever few mods you download that adds more than just some armour or mesh/textures. It's a slow process but try and check the first quest or 2 if you add quest mods to see if they are stable. If you add sex related mods from this site that are a work in progress...expect them to be a work in progress. Make sure to read every description for incompatibilities too.  Make sure your versions match up for your skyrim SE 1597 or AE 16++

 

You can run an extremely stable and long running save with modded SSE. I run over 1000 mods and have had a save last over 300 hours before I got bored with it.

 

1 hour ago, Anunya said:

Also, if there's a way to look at existing saves and understand whether they'll eventually end up in that state that would be super useful as well. Any ideas?

The holy grail of skyrim tech support. Nope, there are several tools to diagnose crashes and conflicts like NSF, LOOT, and SSedit, but no definitive wat to look and see if something is Doomed from the go.

 

The best and also some of the most common advice I can give is set your load order in stone and don't add or remove mods during a playthrough.(EDIT: I personally cheat on this advice all the time, but it is good advice )

[Anunya]

Thanks!

 

I guess I'll take a stab at updating and redoing my load order from scratch. I was doing pretty well for a few years, but recently (well until I took a break) it'd become increasingly more frequent. Maybe I've been a little... too promiscuous... with the mods I've allowed recently.

 

The problem with taking it slow is that often the problem would show up 20-30-50 hours into a playthrough, once I'd really committed to it. It's a bit of a challenge to test everything for 20+ hours before adding one or two more mods incrementally

 

Maybe I'll rebuild my load order from scratch and see how it goes... or maybe I'll give LE a try, since a bunch of the mods I'm the most interested in are written in LE and I've been using SE ports of them that may or may not be completely trustworthy.