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What makes Fallout 4 crash?

JM91

JM91

Member
Messages
56
I've noticed that sometimes my (heavily modded) Fallout 4 will crash at random, so I'm pretty sure it's not a mod conflict or a certain cell being messed up. While I do have 500+ mods installed, none of them are 4k high def texture packs or the like.
I noticed the random crashes will occur when fast traveling from one big settlement to another big settlement or other "intense" areas, like downtown or other NPC heavy cells. Is Fallout running out of VRAM? It is usually just straight a CTD, but due to autosaves not much is lost. When I load back into the game, the fast travel will go off without a hitch.
I've been curious about this, but haven't been able to find a definitive answer.
I do have Buffout and the crash logger installed, but I can't make much out of the reports
Some additional info:
  • I'm usually at 40-60 fps (locked)
  • When looking at task manager during the crashes, Fallout will be at anything from 9 GB to 16 GB RAM, not VRAM
  • My laptop has 32GB RAM, a 3070 with 8 GB VRAM and a Ryzen 9 5900HX, for example I'm able to run Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p at medium to high settings at a stable 50-60 fps
  • I run Fallout at 1440p, with Ultra textures, the rest is set so low-medium settings, using BethINI
 
A lot of things can cause a crash. You may want to check out this Nexus page for an older utility that can help scan crash logs - https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/56255

This is a helpful article as well, as it also lists a lot of known perpetrators of crashes. Even though it's old, a lot of people still have a bunch of these mods in their load orders.
www.nexusmods.com

FO4 - How To Install Buffout 4 And Resolve Most Common Crashes

[left][size=3][font=Arial][i][color=#e69138]DISCLAIMER: [/color]To prevent any misunderstandings, I am not associated with the Buffout 4 author / dev [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/users/5
www.nexusmods.com www.nexusmods.com

If it's crashing at a settlement, there's likely two potential causes. One, to get it out of the way, is if you have any broken precombines. If you use Scrap Everything or something like that, that's going to cause you lots of crashes. To put it simply, Scrap Everything de-optimizes the game significantly. That's not great when you are going to then strain the game by engaging in lots of settlement building. Hopefully you aren't using Scrap Everything, as it is pretty much putting a ticking time bomb in your save. Things might seem all well and good for awhile, but it won't last.

Second thing is scrap crash. There's some great information about there here. Basically it's power grid corruption. There's a variety of tools Workshop Framework has built into it if you have F4SE, which you should because you have buffout. You can use the Workshop Framework holotape (craftable at the chemistry station or elsewhere if you have ECO or something like that) to do a remote reset of the power grid at a settlement, or destroy it if that's potentially what's causing the issue. There are other advanced mods and utilities too that help with that.

Power Grid Scrap Crash

fallout.wiki fallout.wiki

Another thing to watch out for is The Triangle of Death. This is if you build too much on too many settlements too close together. If you're standing in certain places (i.e. the bridge in sanctuary) it might load several settlements all at once that are heavily built upon and it doesn't matter how sophisticated your PC is - it's going to hurt and potentially the engine won't be able to handle it. That's why it's recommended to be judicious when doing big settlement builds, particularly when it's close together. Modestly build on two and leave the other alone, you'll be fine. Build big on one and leave the other two alone, you'll be fine. Build big on all three - YIKES. There are additional areas of the game where this can become an issue as well - too may custom settlements added all very close to each other, so just be cognizant of all that if you are using a bunch of mods that add extra settlements/workshops.
 
Thanks for the response, I'll give the articles a look.
I don't think its precombines, I don't use Scrap Everything, only a mod, that allows me to scrap bramble and trash decals. I also try not to build too many large settlements, for the reason you mentioned. I'll give the grid reset a try, though it also happens outside of settlements, for example I just destroyed the Institute with the MM, and had a crash entering a new room. When I reloaded, no problem entering.
I'm more curious, as to what causes it hardware wise, for example, New Vegas can't handle more than 4GB RAM, and it'll crash, when too much RAM is used. I was wondering what limits FO4, so is it CPU, RAM, GPU, too many scripts running at once, etc.
 
JM91 said:
Thanks for the response, I'll give the articles a look.
I don't think its precombines, I don't use Scrap Everything, only a mod, that allows me to scrap bramble and trash decals. I also try not to build too many large settlements, for the reason you mentioned. I'll give the grid reset a try, though it also happens outside of settlements, for example I just destroyed the Institute with the MM, and had a crash entering a new room. When I reloaded, no problem entering.
I'm more curious, as to what causes it hardware wise, for example, New Vegas can't handle more than 4GB RAM, and it'll crash, when too much RAM is used. I was wondering what limits FO4, so is it CPU, RAM, GPU, too many scripts running at once, etc.
Click to expand...
Can't speak to any of that - my computer is ancient and I get very few crashes, but I also use heavily optimized textures. I do remember a lot about certain newer NVIDIA drivers causing lots of crashes though.
 
Which texture packs are you using out of curiousity? I've tried Performout and Vivid 1k, didn't make any difference in regards to crashes or fps
 
This one -
www.nexusmods.com

Fallout 4 - Texture Optimization Project

Vanilla textures are far too large for the majority of computers to handle, such as 2K-Res textures for 40-60% of all diffuse maps in the game, even on grass! This is ridiculous. This mod fixes th
www.nexusmods.com www.nexusmods.com

It's old but it's never done me dirty.
 
Totally agree with @Captain LaserBeam, it can most definitely be a driver. I just uploaded to the newest version of the Nvidia driver and in the last 3 days my FPS is dropping down to 45 at times and I have had 3 crashes that don't produce crash logs. Hopefully they will come out with another update soon or I can revert back to the previous version.
 
It's insane how poorly optimized this game is, my hardware should be able run this with maxed settings all the way, but here we are. I know that the 500 mods don't help, but I can run SSE with close to 1000 plugins, and it's waaaaay more stable
 
Mystical Panda said:
From what I can tell it's mostly bad data that goes 'unchecked' at the engine level code; ie.,. null references, mal-formed or data values 'out of the normal range'- things like that.
Click to expand...
Yeah I was going to say something similar.
Fallout (actually bethesda games in general) seem to accumulate redundant data during a play session. Like it's not good at forgetting stuff to free up memory for new information. Eventually it pops.
Doing a save and reload every couple of hours helps for me.
 
Yeah, I noticed that. Fallout 4 sometimes racks up to 25 GB of RAM usage for me. I've gotten used to the crashes and since they often happen during cell change, usually there is an autosave for to fall back on. Still, I'm always interested to pull back the curtain a bit and see how a game or software works/"thinks"
 
Now that is very interesting, that tool looks very useful. My errors are almost exclusively access violation errors, according to Buffout and crashes for me happen mostly randomly during cell change, or if there are a LOT of NPCs on screen (like an Institute assault on my level 3 Castle)
 
JM91 said:
Now that is very interesting, that tool looks very useful
Click to expand...
It's something I've been working on for awhile and helps me to see a more 'overall' metric view of the data. I'm working towards a free release but development time is slow and it's a fairly large project. Plus I'm kinda 'lazy' at times and write stuff to help me manage this mess a bit better. I mostly work on it in my spare time and am thinking about putting a daily build up so some of it might be helpful.

The thing that surprised me was the really strange errors that were related to bad-formed or intermittenly broken pre-vis, pre-combines. I'm venturing a guess that the F4SE address library has something like EntryPoint:Description(or name) which allows better readability and easiler mapping which was those strange errors reported by Buffout.

The less 'broken' pre-vis, pre-combines I had the less loose file stream cropped up. The worst case was at Diamond City where it generated something like a BSShadowNode(or something like that) error before crashing- thank goodness by going to the lastest 69.x release of PRP seemed to allieviate that.
JM91 said:
My errors are almost exclusively access violation errors, according to Buffout and crashes for me happen mostly randomly during cell change
Click to expand...
I'm thinking this is due to either unloading references that are already unloaded, a script that's still running and referencing something that's actually unloaded or trying to load up something that has a 'nested' or 'embedded' reference that is 'bad data' or doesn't exist(a null reference). So I can't say that even if the game can load a null reference(handle it programmatically) that each one is also properly handled while unloading a data structure with an embedded 'null reference'.
JM91 said:
or if there are a LOT of NPCs on screen (like an Institute assault on my level 3 Castle)
Click to expand...
Sometime just because something 'can be done' doesn't mean it's 'standing on solid ground'. If that makes sense. I believe that Bethesda spends more time fiddling with settings rather than re-coding- at least from what little I've seen. So 'it works', but only as they've 'tweaked it'. You can... use scripting functions to do a lot of things... but it doesn't mean that the engine will properly handle it as they've only tested and take responsibility for their own tweaking. In a way.
 
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Mystical Panda said:
I'm thinking this is due to either unloading references that are already unloaded
Click to expand...
So, to me, if it happens immediately before a cell load I would venture it's either unloading previously loaded data or calculating something to apply to the newly loaded data. If it crashes while loading it, at least to me, would imply 'bad' data, combination of data that would be 'bad', a failed 'race' condition that wasn't previously known, or a data arbitration(such as lists) issue.
 
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Mystical Panda said:
It's something I've been working on for awhile and helps me to see a more 'overall' metric view of the data. I'm working towards a free release but development time is slow and it's a fairly large project. Plus I'm kinda 'lazy' at times and write stuff to help me manage this mess a bit better. I mostly work on it in my spare time and am thinking about putting a daily build up so some of it might be helpful.

The thing that surprised me was the really strange errors that were related to bad-formed or intermittenly broken pre-vis, pre-combines. I'm venturing a guess that the F4SE address library has something like EntryPoint:Description(or name) which allows better readability and easiler mapping which was those strange errors reported by Buffout.

The less 'broken' pre-vis, pre-combines I had the less the loose file stream cropped up. The worst case was at Diamond City where it generated something like a BSShadowNode(or something like that) error before crashing- thank goodness by going to the lastest 69.x release of PRP seemed to allieviate that.

I'm thinking this is due to either unloading references that are already unloaded, a script that's still running and referencing something that's actually unloaded or trying to load up something that has a 'nested' or 'embedded' reference that is 'bad data' or doesn't exist(a null reference). So I can't say that even if the game can load a null reference(handle it programmatically) that each one is also properly handled while unloading a data structure with an embedded 'null reference'.

Sometime just because something 'can be done' doesn't mean it's 'standing on solid ground'. If that makes sense. I believe that Bethesda spends more time fiddling with settings rather than re-coding- at least from what little I've seen. So 'it works', but only as they've 'tweaked it'. You can... use scripting functions to do a lot of things... but it doesn't mean that the engine will properly handle it as they've only tested and take responsibility for their own tweaking. In a way.
Click to expand...
Yeah, usually I tend to stay away from larger settlement plans, due to how badly the game can handle them. Anyway, I'm hoping we'll see a release of your tool, being able to see what led to or happened right before a crash would be huge.
Due to the randomness of my crashes, I've largely been unable to make progress in solving them, other than trial and error in deactivation mods (which I know, can cause missing references in itself)
 
JM91 said:
Anyway, I'm hoping we'll see a release of your tool, being able to see what led to or happened right before a crash would be huge
Click to expand...
I'm shooting for the first of year for a very very pre-alpha build as there are tons(...tons!) of functions and 'other' things built and and it's a 'mess' in some parts of the code until I get time to refactor it.
JM91 said:
I've largely been unable to make progress in solving them, other than trial and error in deactivation mods (which I know, can cause missing references in itself)
Click to expand...
Yeah that is a complete [pita] to say the least. I had quite a few of Zorkaz's mods in before I started getting all those buffer overruns. Took them out no problem. Put them back in- buffer overruns. Which, at first, would lead me to believe it was something in his mods. However, I'd had them in for many many load orders without problems so I wasn't sure what the issue was. Taking out the mods that add 'player coments' except either one or two, DTF, the newest 69.x build for PRP along with the latest prp patches for some of my mods, and the mod where damage numbers would spill out like Borderlands(it conflicted with DirectHIt and I wanted to test that one out) seemed to clear most everything up. Thank goodness!

Since then, during this playthrough, I've added and removed mods(I know, bad... but I love testing the limits sometimes) and so far the game save seems to be stable though some orphaned and related suspended stacks are now persistent(though not manu).

Now that I think of it... I'll add those mods back in and see if they gel ok now.
 
Here's a quick follow up trying to add some mods back in and getting the same error, along with a bit more information on my game save and few other things. Hope it helps!

Be sure to wait for the 2160p processing- when YouTube compresses my screen res is looks the textures are from a Doom 1 WAD file!
 
You've been very helpful so far and helped me to get a better understanding as to how Fallout 4, or the Creation Engine rather, works. Thank you very much
 
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