Help - Exterior World Space Freezes and CTDs

[MadWizard25]

I get CTDs and freezes in Exterior World spaces quite often, and it is becoming a major irritant. The freezes are total; i have to ctrl+alt+delete TESV.exe to exit Skyrim, and the CTDs are CTDs without any warning. This only occurs in world spaces, i.e. outdoors, wilderness, etc. My experience with oblivion tells me this is a mesh issue usually, but disabling mesh mods does not seem to fix the issue for me. Before i launch into frantic troubleshooting mode I was hoping if anybody else had experienced this issue? Any help or ideas would be appreciated, as i desperately try to avoid disabling mods one by one.

 

Additional Info:

- Only since latest patch

- Occurs with STEP setup, without any extra mods, vanilla is fine

- Occurs with or without texture optimization

- Occurs when trying out a new game

- Searched nexus, bethesda, and steam forums to no avail. plenty of people seem to have this issue? (in reality probably small minority)

- SoS sound mods do not cause it

- I occasionally hit 2GB VRAM allocation (use?), but using skyrim performance monitor shows that the crashes are not linked to hitting the VRAM ceiling

- Using gamebooster, steam offline, no overlay, all desktop notifications/ popups disabled, fully defragged

- Tried Papyrus and budgetcap ini tweaks

- Clearing all cells after 31 day wait, no effect

 

So if anybody has experienced this issue and/ or somehow fixed it, even if it was with one of the things i already tried above, i would grateful for any comments. Thanks!

 

Edit:

- Freezes and CTDs, occurring frequently, averaging ever 15/ 20 minutes.

- Default ini's, (uGrids=5) after other ini tweaks failed to fix the issue

- Verified game cache

 

Second Edit:

- fps booster did not help

- cpu core affinity did not work

- underclock did not work

[blacksol]

I had that last night on first run with new STEP, a freeze outside Riften. I had it previously but that was caused by SoS Wilds. I uninstalled all mods and vanilla is fine. I am now having an issue with WB thinking vanilla skyrim is missing a strings file although steam has verified local cache so one I reinstall skyrim and reinstall I will let you know if still get it.

[Vond]

I had that last night on first run with new STEP, a freeze outside Riften. I had it previously but that was caused by SoS Wilds. I uninstalled all mods and vanilla is fine. I am now having an issue with WB thinking vanilla skyrim is missing a strings file although steam has verified local cache so one I reinstall skyrim and reinstall I will let you know if still get it.

 

 

Usually that can be fixed by deleting Skyrim.esm and verifying cache after that

 

 

 

As for freezes, I had 2 major freezes last night whilst playing a long session. One was in Whiterun and one just outside Whiterun. Both forced me to ctrl+alt+del out of the game but luckily I had recent saves

[stoppingby4now]

I've been experiencing problems with Dynavision, to the point where the game produces an error and fails to launch. It's the most problematic with uGridsToLoad set to 7.

[MadWizard25]

Thanks for the replies guys. I will retry without the Sounds of Skyrim - The Wilds. I also forgot to mention that I play on the default uGrids of 5, since I need to achieve a stable setup before messing with that. If this would only happen every hour or so I would be okay with the freezes and CTDs, but its now happening every 15 minutes.

 

Im starting to lean towards trying some lower resolution texture packs, but in all honesty, my rig should be able to handle the load just fine, especially since i play at a low resolution.

 

Other things im going to try;

- set affinity from 4 cores to 2

- underclock gpu

- try fps booster v1.1 to see if its a cpu under utilization issue (doubt it but what the heck).

[Vond]

SoS - The Wilds works fine if you use the crash fix though, shouldn't be that at all methinks?

[torminater]

Are you experiencing any save game bloat? compare the size of your new savegames to them before... Dynavision is said to cause that, and maybe some other mods or combinations of them, too!

[blacksol]

It took most of last night to reinstall skyrim due to me stupidly forgetting about skyrim unplugged. So will let you know how I go tonight

[Spiffyman]

Blacksol: I don't about Skyrim Unplugged, but why not have steam backup your game? then, if you need to reinstall you can uninstall skyrim, delete it's folder in steam and then have steam use the backup to re-install it rather than downloading? Then again, if you have really good internet speeds (lucky you) it might be faster to just download the game again...

 

If I misunderstood what you meant, I'm sorry :(

[blacksol]

I have skyrim on DVD and had HRDLC backed up so it was only the updates that had to download.

 

My issue was that i had 'unplugged' steam (well vanilla skyrim only) and forgot that it needed to be 'plugged' back in before verifying local cache, deleting local files and reinstalling skyrim. As I had already deleted local files when i realised this skyrim unplugged wouldn't plug steam back in without some adjustments, then steam tried to download as I still had a vanilla file present to get unplugged to work. After all that it worked fine but then it was time for bed once it had finished reinstalling and updating :)

 

What should have been a few minutes to verify local cache turned into a couple of hours :(

All my own fault! However, it did give me a chance to clean out some leftovers from previous mods

[MadWizard25]

I've been experiencing problems with Dynavision, to the point where the game produces an error and fails to launch. It's the most problematic with uGridsToLoad set to 7.

 

 

Did not install Dynavision, as i personally do not enjoy DoF.

SoS - The Wilds works fine if you use the crash fix though, shouldn't be that at all methinks?

 

 

Yeah, i really dont think that SoS is the issue, i just gave it another shot because of its reputation :P

 

Are you experiencing any save game bloat? compare the size of your new savegames to them before... Dynavision is said to cause that, and maybe some other mods or combinations of them, too!

 

 

Nope no savegame bloat. Lvl 7 character save is 5mb, and the problem persists even with a new game, which starts at about 3-4mb i think.

 

Sorry to hear about your reinstalling pain blacksol :( So now im curious, would trying to verify game cache when skyrim unplugged is on screw up your install? In any case, please stay on topic, i dont mind if you chat about it on the sidelines, but i would rather this thread focus on suggestions for fixes regarding my issue :)

 

Anyways, the latest fixes i mentioned I would try did nothing to fix the issue. Crashes are reproducible as well. I should also add that it may be getting worse. Initially i was able to play a good 1.5h after a fresh resintall/ STEP install before a freeze/ ctd, and now as i mentioned is very frequent.

 

Papyrus logging doesnt show much, getting some error reports, but thats nothing unusual and doesnt seem to be tied to the ctds/ freezes.

 

Next Fix Attempts (starting down the road of uninstalling one by one :():

- Use only 1 hi-res texture pack (SRO), and remove bethesda optimized textures

- Remove SMIM

- Remove SkyTest

[ballsrawls]

Thanks for the replies guys. I will retry without the Sounds of Skyrim - The Wilds. I also forgot to mention that I play on the default uGrids of 5, since I need to achieve a stable setup before messing with that. If this would only happen every hour or so I would be okay with the freezes and CTDs, but its now happening every 15 minutes.

 

Im starting to lean towards trying some lower resolution texture packs, but in all honesty, my rig should be able to handle the load just fine, especially since i play at a low resolution.

 

Other things im going to try;

- set affinity from 4 cores to 2

- underclock gpu

- try fps booster v1.1 to see if its a cpu under utilization issue (doubt it but what the heck).

 

 

yep, i'm experiencing the exact same thing. just yesterday i decided to completely reinstall STEP again, this time without the hi-res texture packs and being very conservative in regards to resolutions when given the choice. unfortunately it resolved absolutely nothing for me. all CTD's are in outdoor world spaces and occur about every 10 min or so. it has to be something recently added, though. have played through with various previous STEP configs and never experienced this.

[torminater]

Well my game is somehwat instable too especially when loading a other savegame whilst playing or pressing "F9". I have NO CLUE why there was a CtD caused by that. But I didn't have the time to play 1,5h of skyrim on one run so maybe I'll have to give you guys an update on my situation!

[MontyMM]

Do you run from an SSD? All I can offer is that my game is unstable in exterior cells when I run from a traditional HDD, but almost entirely stable when a carbon copy of my system is run from the SSD. My suspicion is that Skyrim loads textures from the hard disk in an ad hoc and inefficient way, that occasionally causes problematic spikes of demand.

[torminater]

I am using a SSD for Windows and skyrim...

[blacksol]

ok I have reinstalled STEP and am getting repeatable CTD at Dawnstar, either on fast travel there or fast travel there and then run into town, either towards Jarl's place or the harbour.I had this on the old STEP and thought it was save game corruption. However, when I reinstalled and ran vanilla skyrim only I could run around Dawnstar without issues. Now on new STEP issues are back. Apart from mods only change was ini tweak to decals. So seems one of the mods is causing this.

Just posting in case that helps anyone.

EDIT: Realised i hadn't run BOSS after reinstall, and none of the esps were loaded, so would seem to be an issue with a mod file rather than an esp

EDIT2: mheh VRAM limit hit per GPU-Z - whole time just outside dawnstar when 2 dragons attacked at mid-1200s and have 1280MB, crashed when went in to dawnstar.