PC Dawnguard keeps crashing. can't keep on playing

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Minus2Degrees

Orcish Samurai Dual-Wielding Cuisinart
I'm about to uninstall DG with all that entails, and see if I can get a save to work somewhere back down the line. It's been two weeks since my Soul Cairn crash, tried everything else in the meantime, and I want to use my character again! I'll let you know how it goes.

I didn't even need to uninstall the expansion, because it's not causing me any problems if I don't actually do the Dawnguard quest line. I backed out of that and reverted to a savegame that I carefully made before entering Fort Dawnguard, because I knew this was going to happen, and it's totally fine. I'm doing all the werewolf perk tree stuff right now, and it's stable as stone.

It's just the Soul Cairn. And believe me, I've tried everything to try getting through it. I've reinstalled the entire game, I've eliminated mods that mess with sound, I've never deleted a mod since playing this character, I updated my video drivers, I installed the 1.8 beta patch, I tried playing while not in Crossfire mode, I tried playing in windowed mode, I tried playing on low resolution. Nothing has worked.

Nothing I find online is dated past August for some reason, which makes me think that if anyone else has this problem, they've since given up, because there's no fix.

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Ochre Jelly

New Member
I said I was going to uninstall DG. I sat there, staring at my character, wondering if a recent save would still work or if I would have to go back 70 hours (incidentally DG worked for me up until the Soul Cairn, and I was mixing DG quests and non-DG quests during that time). And I couldn't pull the trigger. Like Captain Ahab, I had to keep hunting.

See post #10 by David Brasher:
Is Dawnguard for PC Pretty Much Unusable? - The Nexus Forums
He suggests using a program called BSAOpt (available on Nexus) to "unpack" the Dawnguard.bsa straight into your data folder (BSAOpt automatically slots them into the appropriate subfolders (e.g. meshes, textures, etc)). He also suggests leaving the original bsa file in there too (you should of course make a back-up of your Data folder beforehand, because you are NOT going to want to clean DG out of there manually if you don't like the results).

So, in a last ditch effort, I tried it out last night. The function mentioned above is really simple, nothing to be afraid of. And indeed, I was convinced I had the holy grail and was becoming downright ebullient. Of course, I finally had a crash. I think the "unpacking" into loose files (that, generally speaking, over-ride anything but other loose files) may have helped delay the crash, but I cannot be certain of that. There is the feel of a pyrric victory. But hey. Might work for you.
 

Ochre Jelly

New Member
I didn't even need to uninstall the expansion, because it's not causing me any problems if I don't actually do the Dawnguard quest line.

So Minus2, thank you for talking a bit. A bit of troubleshooting, a bit of misery loves company, a bit of help accepting the inevitable. Hey, it could be worse, New York is getting hit by a major storm right now.

My brother has DG installed and has no problems. He uses mods, incidentally, but he has never started the actual DG quest. His experience fits with your theory. But-- I have a question or two for you if you have the time.

Do you think a save right before entering the Soul Cairn is worth testing out? (Maybe that is me just being lazy, but sometimes it seems to take an earth day for me to test a new save or method (and I'm currently unemployed-- it's the trauma of a freeze/ctd I tell you, not the actual time involved!)).

If not, do you think a save post-DG, but pre- what, finding moth priest ("Prophet"), would work? I see that you went back to before you entered Fort Dawnguard for the first time. I get what you are saying with that; I also understand the theory that activating a certain quest could be the problem-- I just wondered if you had a particular experience that drove you all the way back to the beginning.

Anyway, sounds like you know what you are doing and know the different tricks. Thanks again for the help!!
 

Ochre Jelly

New Member
Oh, and for the record, Bira96 above, who posts about a brother who experiences a crash when talking to Durnehviir , is not my brother, at least not to my knowledge. ;)

So we have a couple Soul Cairn casualties right here.
 

Minus2Degrees

Orcish Samurai Dual-Wielding Cuisinart
Bira96 above, who posts about a brother who experiences a crash when talking to Durnehviir

More for the record, my very first playthrough of Dawnguard indeed got as far as Durnehviir teaching me how to call him, and me trying to search for the rest of my captured soul, when I crashcrashcrashcrashcrashcrashcrashed and couldn't go any further. So that's my high water mark at this point.
 

Raetac

Youtube Adventurer
Have you guys tried the beta patch? it's 1.8 I'm pretty sure. Sound exactly like the problems I was having until I decided to try the beta patch out of desperation. It seems to have cleared most everything up for me so.. maybe give it a try. You have to opt in for the beta through your Steam account manager, I dont know off hand exactly where but I'm sure its in there somewhere.
 

Bira96

Member
All of these stories are really starting to freak me out. Yesterday the game kept crashing when I attempted to save in Surljin's (or something like that) sinkhole, but oddly enough, it worked just fine once I went outside. And I haven't even started the DG questline yet. I might never go anywhere near it after hearing all of this. I am just starting to get roots in all of the main questlines, and I am NOT taking any risks on having to start all over again.
EDIT: in Reply to minus two degrees: sorry, your post showed up just after I posted this. From what you, and everyone else is saying, it sounds like DG is just really screwed up right now. It's like.. Skyrim's natural predator. I'll be sure to warn off other Skyrim players about this.
 

Raetac

Youtube Adventurer
Actually my problems hit me even before I started the Dawnguard questline.. however I did start a new game with the expansion and had the problems start then. Another thing you may want to try if you have a quad or hex core system is to restrict the TESV.exe program down to 2 cores in your task manager. Its a tweak thats helped me out some
 

Ochre Jelly

New Member
Have you guys tried the beta patch? it's 1.8 I'm pretty sure.


I will try 1.8 at some point; thank you for the reminder and glimmer of hope. Of late, trying to figure out my modded-pc-Skyrim-broken-by-Dawnguard problem became too emotionally draining. I am playing Oblivion on xbox.
 

Minus2Degrees

Orcish Samurai Dual-Wielding Cuisinart
I will try 1.8 at some point; thank you for the reminder and glimmer of hope. Of late, trying to figure out my modded-pc-Skyrim-broken-by-Dawnguard problem became too emotionally draining. I am playing Oblivion on xbox.

I already tried 1.8 and it didn't help anything. And I'm not about to go all the way through the quest line from the beginning with a new character again, only to have it die on me. So, I've about given up at this point.
 

Minus2Degrees

Orcish Samurai Dual-Wielding Cuisinart
Update:

SOLVED!!!!1!

It's disgusting that it took this long to kill this gremlin, but at long last, I did so with extreme pleasure. Dawnguard lives!

The culprit turned out to be two lousy lines in skyrim.ini that were inserted when I installed a mod, months and months ago, that allowed free map view zooming:

uLockedObjectMapLOD=8
uLockedTerrainLOD=8

In Skyrim, map mode (entered by pressing "M"), rather than being a separate representation, is the game's actual map, seen from far above -- it's what you would eventually see if you survived getting clubbed by a giant and launched into orbit around Nirn. You can test this yourself the next time you kill a dragon by entering map mode just as you're absorbing its soul; you'll be able to see the glow of your own soul absorption while in map mode!

Now, the mod I installed some months back allowed you to zoom in as far as you liked while in map mode, almost all the way down to surface level again. This is useful if you were looking for some point of interest in the world that wasn't yet given a map marker. But I soon noticed that the mod had caused the map mode to look quite buggy; there was a lot of nausea-inducing texture flickering while scrolling around the map, and trying to scroll accurately while zoomed close turned out to be problematic. So I uninstalled the mod.

Little did I know that the mod had added the above two lines to skyrim.ini. These lines define, as fixed values, the object and terrain level of detail while in map mode. This means that no matter how far in or out you are zoomed, the level of detail will remain the same. However, this also had the horrible side effect of wrestling with other settings while in regular game mode. This resulted in a whole slew of problems while in exterior cells, including infinite loading screens after exiting houses, and hideous Z-fighting (two different textures occupying the same space and constantly battling each other to be the one on top) in distant scenery.

And crashes.

Lots of crashes.

Which brings me to my woes while in the Soul Cairn. This map is a subset of the main Skyrim map, similar to that of Blackreach, and the map mode level of detail settings in skyrim.ini were playing complete hell with it. This is why I couldn't pass between one cell and the next within the Soul Cairn without my graphics cards getting totally confused and utterly crashing the game outright. (This issue indeed also happened often while I was in Blackreach.)

A lucky bit of Googling while researching the aforementioned infinite loading screen problem revealed the solution: Simply delete those two lines. The effect was immediate: Not only were the loading screen freezes gone, but my map mode suddenly was crystal clear again (it had always been jittery even after I uninstalled the mod).

I wondered: Could this also be the cause of my Soul Cairn crashes? So I returned to an abandoned save game from when I was trying to kill the three Gate Keepers, held my breath, and gave it a spin.

It was solid as the greatest faces of granite in Yosemite. Smooth as tempered glass.

No. More. Crashes.

I completed the quest "Beyond Death" for the first time, exiting the Soul Cairn like a wrongly convicted prisoner being released from a penitentiary. LIBERATION.

So, dear readers, my advice to you: If you are having problems with crashing in your game, even with no mods and what you might think are vanilla settings, always backup your skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini and allow the game to create fresh ones. An errant setting that you may have forgotten may be making all the difference!
 

Lynvikk

Member
I've already tried everything: I've reinstalled the game, turned off mods, started a new save, tried all of the tricks you can find through the internet, but the silent crash still happends :/ It always happends in the Soul Cairn, when the mission is updated to "Slay Durnehviir", after few seconds the game exits to desktop. I have the 1.9 patch for Skyrim, please, anyone can help me? ;_;

(Sorry for my english, I'm from Poland..)

I've used the no-clip mode to get to the center of the Boneyard, and nothing happends, the problem is in the mission, the crash happends only when the mission is updated.
 

Bira96

Member
Hmm... I can't think of anything else that may be wrong. I would look up Bethesda on their offical forum and ask for help there. If the programmers can't fix it, no one can.
Are you sure the mods are off? Sometimes if you uncheck the mods in the data file section on the start screen, they'll just load again after their synced because they're subscribed. Wait until a message in the corner says "Done synchronizing subscribed mods!" Then uncheck everything. From the way it sounds, the problem may be a mod that changes the coding to update the quest. If that doesn't work, then you may just have to reload a previous save and uninstall Dawnguard. This DLC was delayed by several months on PS3 for glitches similar to this; maybe the problem is just a scratch in the coding that doesn't let the quest update, and if that's the case, there's nothing that can be done.
 

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