Plethora of Autosaves in AE

[CaptainJ03]

Hi folks,

 

having played LE for about ten years, I am very much confused with the saves in SSE. (ae 1.6.1170)

 

On the starting page, when I want to access not the current save but one a tad older, and be it only ten minutes, there isn't even a list entry for my current character - only when I choose 'show all saves' I see some saves.

Then I looked into the Saves folder and nearly got a heart attack: there are 290 files called Autosave1 (with weird number-letter combination following), 390 Autosave2, 333 Autosave3 files, and 34 Quicksaves. What happened to 3 Autosaves and one quicksave?!

Aaand - the numbering/counting of regular saves is weird too. Made a save before beoming Lola, that was No.12, and then a hard save just after - which got the No.5. Whut? Bethesda, are you kidding me?!

Sometimes I don't even get an autosave. Entering Dragonsreach okay, leaving (after doing stuff)... nothing. Had to do all that crap again.

 

Am I missing something? An ini file that no-one told me about? Do I need some other mod to organise the saves?

Any help appreciated...

[traison]

1 hour ago, CaptainJ03 said:

Bethesda, are you kidding me?!

 

I wouldn't blame Bethesda here. As far as I know the saves are grouped by the player name. You have a mod which keeps changing and incrementing your player name for whatever reason.

[CaptainJ03]

57 minutes ago, traison said:

I wouldn't blame Bethesda here. As far as I know the saves are grouped by the player name. You have a mod which keeps changing and incrementing your player name for whatever reason.

Whenever I opened Racemenu (during my first setup, testrun, however you might call it) the game made a "new character" every time, without any name change. After leaving the Lola enslavement I got my name back, so I have a different set of saved games I can access in-game - and even some that were from that testrun where I used a different name. It simply doesn't make sense. One time I didn't even change anything in racemenu, I simply opened it, because I didn't understand how OBody worked - got another set of saves...

 

Spoiler

 

And I really think that autosaves should be overwritten, no matter what character I'm playing. To go back to older saves - that what hard saves are for.

Edited December 25, 2024 by CaptainJ03

[traison]

10 minutes ago, CaptainJ03 said:

It simply doesn't make sense.

 

It was implemented in Fallout 4 then transfered over to SSE with the engine swap. It makes sense to those that want to play multiple characters at once, or want to return to older characters; and do not use a mod manager that has profile-specific saves. Depending on where the filtering is implemented, this may or may not be an engine limitation, as in, you'd need either a bytecode edit or a UI mod which doesn't implement this filtering.

Edited December 25, 2024 by traison

[belegost]

Brace yourself, long wall of text ahead, but read all of it carefully.

 

SE/AE has character profiles. Each save is made for a specific character profile, provided nothing changes this character's name. Normally it should be 3 auto-saves per character, but with mods like Engine Fixes you can increase that by editing settings file. I have it set at 5 for example.

 

If you change your character's name during the game, next save will create a new profile. You can see all the profiles for main menu, and you can access any save file, but from within a game you only have access to saves made for that character on that profile. If a new profile was somehow created, well, you can't really backtrack without exiting to the main menu. Which is irrelevant anyway, as you should never load a prior save without completely exiting the game and booting it up again. This is because of a known engine bug and I won't go into details about it here.

 

Since you use Lola, I assume you now have 3 new profiles: your original character profile as it was created, your Lola character profile when the name was changed by the owner, and a new profile made when the character got back their old name. Each has their own auto-saves and you can't really go back to your old profile even if you go back to previous name written exactly as it was. You will just have two character profiles with the same name.

 

However it gets even better. Please read on.

 

If you use a mod that has interior cells that are either not flagged properly or have incorrect EditorID, any auto-save made within such cell will not be tied to any profile and will be what I call "free-floating". Not sure if that is the correct term, but that means it will not be tied to any profile and the game will not overwrite them. So, any future visits in such cells will create more and more and more auto-saves that will eventually bloat your save folder. Same actually goes for any manual or quick save. They can't be seen if you load the game by selecting a character, they can only be seen from "show all saves" option. Usually when people see auto-saves this way they assume it's tied to recent character, so this may go unnoticed for quite some time, unless someone starts analysing their save folder, just like you did. Props to you for catching that, I guess.

 

There is also another issue tied to what I said above.

 

Whenever you load the game from a save made inside such a cell, all your future saves on this character, regardless if manual, quick or auto-saves will either create a new profile or will be "free-floating" as well and will only create a new profile after you change character's name again (or just enter and exit RaceMenu). So the adice is to never load a game from such cells.

Popular mods that I know have cells with this issue are SLS Kennels and Unforgiving Skyrim's Inconspicuous House. From my understanding, this most likely occurs on mods that are developed on LE and are then ported to SE. Since LE doesn't have character profiles, the mod authors that develop on LE usually don't notice this problem. Laura's and Dollmaker's are okay though.

 

If you want to know more details have a look at my recent discussion with @kurotatsu over at Unforgiving Skyrim thread, where I go into details about it.

That was a long read, if you got to this point without glossing over, say Gargamel likes smurf cocks.

 

Now, since you also mentioned that you have new profiles being made whenever you open RaceMenu, I think you must've changed your character's name in some fashion. Either clicked on the box with the name instead of just confirming, or deleted a letter and then added it back, or something along those lines. This should NOT happen just by entering and exiting RM if you did nothing to character's name. Doesn't matter if you changed anything else about said character - race, gender, any sliders, overlays, you name it. Only the name matters. If it does for you, that means you have a completely different issue here, with I have never seen before, so I can't help you.

Edited December 25, 2024 by belegost

[CaptainJ03]

7 minutes ago, belegost said:

However it gets even better. Please read on.

 

If you use a mod that has interior cells that are either not flagged properly or have incorrect EditorID, any auto-save made within such cell will not be tied to any profile and will be what I call "free-floating".

(...)

From my understanding, this most likely occurs on mods that are developed on LE and are then ported to SE. Since LE doesn't have character profiles, the mod authors that develop on LE usually don't notice this problem.

 

Thank you for the long explanation, and you found the culprit: I made my own "Joe's House" mod in LE, tested if it works in AE and it does. Of course, most of my saves (hard saves before trying out some new mod, autosaves on sleeping) are done in that house, so that explains why everything in my saves folder is inconsistent. I think I'll take the big deletion hammer in the saves folder, and tomorrow, after a good night's sleep, look how to fix my house mod.

[belegost]

If you look at save files naming convention  you will notice they have a 16-digit control sum. This is what defines to what profile they belong. Any change in that control sum and you have a new profile.

[CaptainJ03]

19 minutes ago, belegost said:

If you look at save files naming convention  you will notice they have a 16-digit control sum. This is what defines to what profile they belong. Any change in that control sum and you have a new profile.

That number stayed the same for most of the time (and went back after the Lola episode...) But there's an 8-digit number at the start of the savefile that changed to 00000000 after saving in a _DL_CellSeamstress cell. So it might not even be my own mod. Or both. Aaaarghh!!!

...and as far as I can see, I have too many auto- and quicksaves even from before I installed my own house. Exactly what I need...

 

Edit: The Interiors of Devious Lore have underscores in their names. The Seamstress in Mistress Ellarie in Altmeri Imports...

Edited December 25, 2024 by CaptainJ03

[belegost]

What I usually do on long playthroughs, I delete saves in batches of 99 after passing 200, leaving only last save made in LAL cell before proper start and then full hundreds behind as a sort of backup. So I have say, Save 5, then 100, 200, 300, 400, etc. I do it routinely to keep stuff tidy. I usually run 2 to 3 characters at one time per any load order change, but only one "main" into high hundreds. The rest are usually for testing stuff or fucking around. I couldn't do it without the existence of character profiles and not get wrong stuff deleted.

Engine Fixes has an option which makes a regular hard save whenever a quicksave would be made, so I save often by just pressing F5, without having to go into menu. Very convenient. I normally have saves numbering into 500's well before reaching level 20.

My longest-running character several years back had saves over 3000, thought he last time I passed level 50 was long, long, long time ago.

Edited December 26, 2024 by belegost

[CaptainJ03]

10 hours ago, CaptainJ03 said:

The Interiors of Devious Lore have underscores in their names.

Aaand @tamai already made a fix with an updated ESP:

 

I hope that this solves my problem, am going to install that and start a new game.

 

6 hours ago, belegost said:

Engine Fixes has an option which makes a regular hard save whenever a quicksave would be made, so I save often by just pressing F5, without having to go into menu. Very convenient. I normally have saves numbering into 500's well before reaching level 20.

My longest-running character several years back had saves over 3000, thought he last time I passed level 50 was long, long, long time ago.

So it seems I need the Engine Fixes too. From what I understood (which is not much) they're incompatible with ABBA and OBody, but maybe that only needs some tweaks.

 

For a game that's said to be sooo much better than LE, it needs a LOT of fumbling, tweaking and installing mods just to ged around all the crap Beth made...

[belegost]

2 hours ago, CaptainJ03 said:

For a game that's said to be sooo much better than LE, it needs a LOT of fumbling, tweaking and installing mods just to ged around all the crap Beth made...

Same shit as existed in LE, except LE didn't have a fix.

I'm certain you had to fumble with stuff in LE too, only you probably did it so long ago, you forgotten. Well, SE is a different kind of beast but since it's Bethesda game, of course it needs fixing.

 

2 hours ago, CaptainJ03 said:

From what I understood (which is not much) they're incompatible with ABBA and OBody, but maybe that only needs some tweaks

I don't know where you got that from. I use ABBA with no issues. OBody is above my CPU's pay grade, so I don't know, but I have no idea how they would conflict, since one has nothing to do with the other.

 

You also want:

Bug Fixes SSE

Vanilla Script MicroOptimizations

Scrambled Bugs

Animation Limit Crash Fix

Mu Joint Fix

CrosshairRefEvents Fix (LL)

Animation Motion Revolution

 

All of the above are things you should install first, even before you even start considering what kind of flavour you want out of your current load order.

 

Some stuff you might consider:

Better Third Person Selection - not a bug fix per se, but I hate how utterly frustrating it is to pick up stuff in 3rd person in vanilla, and how dated it feels.

Notification Log - logs all on-screen notifications, so you can check what that that wall of text, that only appeared briefly in the corner, while you were busy doing other stuff said.

More Informative Console - console that's actually usable

 

And finally have a look through wSkeever's profile and his mods. He has A LOT of them and lot of tweaks, fixes and QOL improvements.

Edited December 26, 2024 by belegost