What to do when LOOT isn't working

[TheHuntress1970]

So, recently when using LOOT I'm crashing when the game starts. I've been moving mods around manually but it's quite a chore. I know this is probably my only recourse but if a mod isn't being properly placed by LOOT is there anything to do to help resolve this for LOOT?

[Aurora95]

Im sure theres a better way but you could do what i do...and that is disable a few mods at a time and single out what causing it

 

gl

[yatol]

load tesedit, if something is wrong, it will tell you what

[TheHuntress1970]

Thanks for the replies but, Yatol, how would tesedit tell me if something is wrong? It runs through perfectly without any error is there something else with it? My game loads its when I get in game it crashes. If I start a new game it crashes at Bethesda Presents.

[yatol]

if tesedit can load, then it's not the load order

 

 

[Gameplayer]

If the game is crashing before the start menu.

 

TesVedit

 

If the game is crashing during gameplay,

 

We have a whole variety pack of flavors for why this happens to modded games.

 

My favorite to check first.

 

1) Save Game Cleaner,

I find that a lot of orphan scripts are culprits for performance and also primarily crashes.

 

2) VRAM overload,

Your choice of graphics modifications exceeds the capacity of your CPU/GPU out put or throughput however you want to say it point is you've got too high textures most of the texture packs available are unrealistic to run on even well set up computers at acceptable frame rates and what do you think is going to happen when you tax this system with some sexy mods or immersion mods?

 

2a) What I mean is that since Skyrim can tend to use the CPU for processes that we assume are for only graphics that can lead to problems cause now your running into script process lag prematurely and such as an example.  So its not just that the Vram is overloaded kinda a misnomer.

 

2b) Hard disk problem.  The quantity of information that your hard disk has to fetch and deliver to RAM and VRAM can be an issue.

 

2c) RAM quality/quantity is not high enough, nuff said.

 

3) Computer Maintenance Issue

If the Load Order your using has worked before your issue could simply be a computer wide problem as in it doesn't really matter what  program your using problem will persist anywhere.  This is due to a lot of things and although many will assume its a virus, I tend to find that its more likely one of the following.

 

3a) Defragmented Harddisk.  I tend to move about 1-5 Gigs worth of information on and off of my disk any given day that I'm playing/modding the game.  This far surpasses what is considered normal.  Real Modders have to defrag and do so more often.

 

3b) Window Shopping.  I find that almost all the websites I visit for mods and information on modding tend to want to leave behind information.  These bits can be all sorts of stuff and yes it can cause lag.  Simply put clean out your internet files, cookies, and optimize the storage drives while you are visiting stuff on the internets between plays.

 

4) Overly Cluttered Skyrim Directory.  Related to Hard Disk Issue.  Thing here is that its not smart to leave a whole lot of information in your Skyrim Game Directory that goes unused.  Your Hard Disk has to sort through all that BS this causes lag and crashes when there are several more gigs of stuff not used because it has to search through this BS.  Only matters if there is a tremendous amount of it.

 

5) You have a mod that has bad edits.  This is the worst to search down and takes time and in some cases a whole lot of knowledge and skill to know what you are looking for.  This can lead to people falsely acusing modders of bad mods which is insulting and causes problems in community.

 

You can find some bad edits easily with TesVedit.

 

5a) The easiest thing to look for is <error cannot be resolved>

This is actually more common than you might think and was way more common to older game mods in the past for other games even by "famous game mod authors" its actually funny in some ways until your suffering from the issue.

These are often something that will be beyond most people to fix because it requires being familiar with what the author intended and so filling in the blank may result in unintended behavior.  Removing these can result in unintended behavior or even more problems.

Lastly Some of these are intentional because the author might have used a program that is not recognized by CK or TesVedit.  So they might not even be a problem for that case mod.

 

5b) Typical easiest example of <error cannot be resolved> That causes a crash is when its a magic or visual FX.  The npc uses said item/spell and the visual effect results in <error> this will crash your game immediately.  Filling in these fields with a visual effect can resolve this issue but its not always obvious which one.  Personally have fixed a mod that contained hundred of these missing fields that can take hours of time to do and then what can you post the fix?

 

5c) Bad Merge or Bash patch, hey sometimes but not promised here but yes sometimes the patch you auto-generated is bad and needs to be checked, but that's kinda rare and more likely you just have an unintended winner or some edits that didn't make it through to the end.

 

6) I should have just listed this first.  It can be that EVERYTHING is WORKING AS INTENDED.  You just hit the maximum capacity possible allotted to Skyrim Engine.

 

6a) Easiest Fix, start removing mods you can live without.  I mostly look for mods that do very similar things and unfortunately this might also be a problem see sometimes mods that do similar things are actually causeing the crash because they are competing to make a change.  However if there is no overlap but the end result is does similar thing well why the f have it there and just remove one.  Also removing mods that have stuff that's kinda novel at best and not central to the playthrough can increase performance.

 

6b) Difficult Fix, Merge your Mods esp's down into less ESP's.

This one is hard to explain and it requires knowing for certain that the mod in question is a good mod, cause you don't want to merge bad mods cause then its a bitch to fix.  Another issue with merging mods is that some mods should in fact overwrite a mod, if you merge a mod that should overwrite another mod into it you will have unintended outcomes.  There is also the issue of merge order which may help resolve that issue.  Then there is being familiar with the mod in question hey if you merge two landscape mods together that alter the same space its going to look fugly.

 

6b) a) easiest to merge are Outfit Mods.  Yep, that 1,000 customes you have in your load order is sapping performance right outta your game.  Imagine if that bajillion outfit esp's was just one esp.  Very Possible.

Drawbacks, some of those outfits are/have shoddy meshes and issues in the nif file.  You would only understand what I mean if you spent a lot of time in nifskope like I do but there are quite a few offenders out there.

 

Merge Popular MCM menu mods and only the ones that have solid rep that are no longer updating.  Hey you know those mods that stopped updating like a year or two ago cause they are considered complete?  Yes merge those and test to see that it works.

 

c) Most landscapes and houses:  That you are sure will not occupy same space and do not contain unresolved <error can not be found> or bad Nav Mesh.  Those are great to merge down to one file.

 

6 Conclusion)  You might have working load order, but there are just too many esp's, although many people say the limit is 255 this is by no means the safe spot.  A safe spot is more like less than 100 esp's.  After that your looking at performance issues that lead to problems.

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

I'm largely assuming that you have Shezan's Memory Fix.

 

OneTweak

 

as well as a whole host of others I cant be buggerred to remember.

 

I forgot an obvious one, Long Play sessions with a lot of exiting/starting the game, Restart your computer.

[Ashkandii]

it if crashes before you hit the main menu then its beyond me

if it crashes when your try loading or saving a new game then (1 if your using MO remove your man made fnis file happens to me recently where it crashes due to FNIS's generated animations (2 if not using MO then i guess you'll have to manually remove the generated files if that dont work then try using the suggestions above or figure out something

[Gameplayer]

Oh right I forgot another one.

 

If your First Load is crashing.

 

There is a way around this.

 

The first game load has to load up everything and I mean every friggan thing fresh into memory and damn that's actually pretty freakin hard on the Engine.

 

What I do to get around this is I "Start New Game" 

Reason is that I want my load order in this "new game" to be the same, that is same scripts running.  So I wait a bit in my "new game" and let stuff finish running.  Then make a save.

 

From there I load the game save I actually want to play.

[TheHuntress1970]

The thing is, is that I don't really have a lot of texture mods. I have supreme storms and true storms for vanilla - I'm not using COT as its not compatible with the ENB that I use. I have night sky, supreme fog, JK cities... I have used these in the past. I have always kept my order lower than 250. My game was running fine but had some CTDs that weren't being affected by any mod as I would run a vanilla game and would still crash at the same spot. I resolved these by reinstalling the game. My previous load order was manually set as I was having the same issue with LOOT and it ran just fine. It's when I run LOOT that I crash starting a new game at the Bethesda Presents. 

 

I go through the menu, select New, it loads - I use Skyrim Unbound - to Bethesda Presents and boom - desktop.

 

I have had to always jump start the game by loading my first save and then loading my last save.

 

When I change any mod I start a new game.

[TheHuntress1970]

Okay... Riddle me this - out of curiosity I download and run BOSS and my game runs like a charm. It says it doesn't recognize 79 mods and I know that BOSS is old and that LOOT is suppose to be the newer edition of it but I'm not crashing.

[Anatriax]

Okay... Riddle me this - out of curiosity I download and run BOSS and my game runs like a charm. It says it doesn't recognize 79 mods and I know that BOSS is old and that LOOT is suppose to be the newer edition of it but I'm not crashing.

 

Are you using the 0.70 Beta of loot? or the stable version? The new beta shouldn't cause any issues for you.

[Ashkandii]

 

Okay... Riddle me this - out of curiosity I download and run BOSS and my game runs like a charm. It says it doesn't recognize 79 mods and I know that BOSS is old and that LOOT is suppose to be the newer edition of it but I'm not crashing.

 

Are you using the 0.70 Beta of loot? or the stable version? The new beta shouldn't cause any issues for you.

 

+ the beta interface is sexy.