New Load Order, New Freeze then Crash Upon starting New Game (or COC QASmoke)

[DuskWanderer]

As the title suggests, recently I've created a new LO that should work fine on paper. Only of course it isn't in practice.

When attempting to start a new game--or load QASmoke--The game freezes for a solid few minutes before eventually crashing.

It appears to be some sort of VCRUNTIME140.dll crash, yet I have the appropriate C++ version already (x64).

Here's the crashlog: https://pastebin.com/T0paTREx

 

[traison]

9 hours ago, DuskWanderer said:

It appears to be some sort of VCRUNTIME140.dll crash, yet I have the appropriate C++ version already (x64).

 

It crashed because it tried to dereference RCX. I'm not sure if this would qualify as a bug in VCRUNTIME140. I don't know of any way to validate whether a memory pointer is safe to read or not, outside of maybe trying to do something with VirtualQueryEx. My point here being, I wouldn't assume the issue is in VCRUNTIME140, but rather in the data its being fed. Your issue is actually in the instructions that came before the CALL instruction that preceded SkyrimSE.exe+01099BE.

 

If you didn't have the correct version of the MSVC, Skyrim wouldn't even start.

 

9 hours ago, DuskWanderer said:

When attempting to start a new game--or load QASmoke-- ... Here's the crashlog.

 

And which crash is this log from, and is your new game start in the College of Winterhold?

 

SMP is having issues with form id 0x8C005962 from "CollegeOfWinterholdImmersive.esp" in form id 0x8C2AF19E "CWICollegeSanctuary". It also has something to do with the Havok animation graph, and a head.

 

So:

1. Disable SMP and test again.
2. Rebuild the facegen of 0x8c005962.
3. Get the NPC headpart crash fix for SMP if it's still relevant for the version of SMP you're using.
4. Update SMP if you haven't already.
5. Disable CollegeOfWinterholdImmersive and test again.
6. Failing all that, get one crash log from a new game start (where is this?), another from teleporting to qasmoke from the main menu and perhaps a 3rd from teleporting somewhere else: coc Riverwood maybe?

Now with that said, Skyrim in general doesn't like time jumping around. Considering this crash smells like a physics issue, I wouldn't be surprised if it crashed because of the freeze. Physics calculations are tied to the frame rate, and in your case you had a few minutes between frames i.e. ~0.0083 fps. You're basically seeing the opposite of a high framerate where cheese and such starts to fly. Its entirely possible this crash isn't actually the problem you should be investigating.

 

Edit: and yes I'm aware people can run Skyrim at 120 and 240 fps without flying cheese. The physics situation in Skyrim has been improved since LE either by Bethesda, or by mods. But I very much doubt they would have disconnected it from the framerate still.

Edited April 9, 2025 by traison

[DuskWanderer]

Gotcha. I'll be a bit preoccupied for most of the day so I won't be able to test the solutions for a while, but in the meantime I generated two new crashlogs. One for New Game and one for COC QASmoke.

Crash-NewGame.log Crash-QASmoke.log

[traison]

qasmoke crash was caused by oslaroused.dll, disable that and test again.

newgame crash was the same as the first crash log from the OP.

[DuskWanderer]

On 4/9/2025 at 9:37 AM, traison said:

qasmoke crash was caused by oslaroused.dll, disable that and test again.

newgame crash was the same as the first crash log from the OP.

Unfortunately none of the solutions ended up working. So I've opted to do this the fun way: Narrowing down the culprit manually by enabling each mod in small groups at a time.

This actually had an immediate effect. It seems that with only the barebones SKSE frameworks installed, any "Alternate Start" type mod leads to an instant  New Game crash without a freeze. Removing them and doing the default Helgen intro does not crash.

I tested both Live Another Life and Alternate Perspective, crashlogs below.

AP Crash.log ASLAL Crash.log

Edited April 10, 2025 by DuskWanderer

[traison]

32 minutes ago, DuskWanderer said:

Unfortunately none of the solutions ended up working. So I've opted to do this the fun way: Narrowing down the culprit manually by enabling each mod in small groups at a time.

 

That's what I suspected when I said these crash logs may not be indicative of whats going wrong, but rather the freeze is your real issue. You took the correct approach to the freeze by removing mods, as that's the only practical way of debugging one that I know of. Using a debugger I feel like is far too much work in comparison.

 

33 minutes ago, DuskWanderer said:

I tested both Live Another Life and Alternate Perspective, crashlogs below.

 

Both of those crashes were caused by the mod currently providing Interface\RaceSex_menu.swf.

[DuskWanderer]

59 minutes ago, traison said:

Both of those crashes were caused by the mod currently providing Interface\RaceSex_menu.swf.

It's almost definitely RaceMenu then, seeing as a version of that file is packed in its BSA.

I'm using the correct version for my Skyrim and SKSE, so I'll see what various troubleshooting methods result in,

 

[traison]

12 minutes ago, DuskWanderer said:

It's almost definitely RaceMenu then

 

Maybe. Whenever I say the issue is coming from X, you also need to consider what other options may be affecting that. Take for instance the Populated -series of mods, like Populated Roads. I have it installed and it's been working fine for a very long time now, but for some people all it does is cause pathing related crashes. It's a combination of things. So in your case, what you should take from my comment about RaceSex_menu.swf is the following (but perhaps not limited to this):

1. What else do you have that changes UI elements? Any graphics overhauls?
2. If you have Engine Fixes SSE, is the scaleform memory allocators fix enabled? If it is, should it perhaps not be enabled?
3. What are the requirements of RaceMenu? Are all these requirements working as they should, or should you be using different versions of these?

I realize if you keep going down this rabbithole you'll eventually ask the question "is my cpu getting enough voltage to perform this jmp instruction?", but I guess you'll have to find the limit to where it no longer makes sense to pursue it.

 

Edit: and in case you're wondering why this is, there's 2 reasons for it:

1. I generally do not spend that much time on a crash log unless there's something weird about it. Say 5 minutes.
2. A crash log is a snapshot of what the CPU was doing at the time of the crash. In assembly where a million instructions can fly by in less than a second, you realize what I'm actually seeing is really quite brief.

Edited April 10, 2025 by traison

[DuskWanderer]

Well, I think I figured it out.

I disabled race menu and still crashed, but the log was much more informative.

The basic hair mesh used in the generic "Prisoner" player preset had somehow corrupted.

So every time I tried to load a new game with alternate starts, it would load open player customization, load that mesh, and thus crash.

Running Cathedral on it has since fixed the issue.

Edited April 10, 2025 by DuskWanderer

[traison]

I guess we got a live example of what I said in my previous post. There's nothing about a hair in ASLAL Crash.log. Something in that hair crashed RaceMenu in such a way that no obvious trace of it was left in the stack by the time it died. If you hadn't found it yourself, something like this might only have shown up in a debugger attached to SkyrimSE.exe on your local computer.

[DuskWanderer]

On 4/10/2025 at 8:43 PM, traison said:

I guess we got a live example of what I said in my previous post. There's nothing about a hair in ASLAL Crash.log. Something in that hair crashed RaceMenu in such a way that no obvious trace of it was left in the stack by the time it died. If you hadn't found it yourself, something like this might only have shown up in a debugger attached to SkyrimSE.exe on your local computer.

Exactly. I ended up also finding a few other issues in the LO that may or may not have contributed to the crashes besides the bad hair .Nif:

- Vortex had utterly failed to uninstall the old SKSE version when I upgraded to the latest release. Purging mods and then fully reinstalling Skyrim (by first deleting all of its non-document folders) allowed me to re-enable my LO afterwards and fix a ton of issues.

- A few .ini files in some mods needed to be tweaked to account for updates. Nothing too fancy.

There is only one form of crash I haven't been able to solve. Some MCM menus will instantly crash my game if they are opened. The culprits I've caught so far are Dirt and Blood, as well as EVG Conditional Idles (Extended). I suspect there are more MCMs that will crash as well which I haven't yet caught.

I have already attempted a full reinstall of both mods, as well as downgrading to different versions, yet that did not work in either case.
 

DNBCrash.log EVGCrash.log

Edited April 13, 2025 by DuskWanderer

[traison]

EVGCrash was caused by INTERFACE\EVGCI\EVGCIMCMCover.dds.

 

DNBCrash was caused by the mod that's currently providing the swf behind JournalMenu, which might be quest_journal.swf. I would also disable MenuMaid2.dll and MCMHelper.dll for starters.

[DuskWanderer]

22 hours ago, traison said:

EVGCrash was caused by INTERFACE\EVGCI\EVGCIMCMCover.dds.

 

DNBCrash was caused by the mod that's currently providing the swf behind JournalMenu, which might be quest_journal.swf. I would also disable MenuMaid2.dll and MCMHelper.dll for starters.

Got it, I'll take a look at those mods.

Additionally Eating Animations and Sounds also caused the crash.

crash-2025-04-14-22-34-42.log

[DuskWanderer]

Alright, I've made an interesting discovery.

I checked the quest_journal.swf and made sure to uninstall every mod that overrides it. No fix afterwards.

So I did the next most reasonable thing: I deleted the interface .dds of DnB, EVGCI, and EAS.

Their MCMs no longer crash when opened. So something about how my game is loading those textures is causing the issue.

In the meantime, MCM interface logos are absolutely unnecessary for me so I'm happy to just purge them