New game was great until a couple days ago...now it crashes constantly...

[Motoman]

So, I started a new game several days ago...after having played through once and then moving on to other stuff like a year ago. Latest patch and such came down, and since I'd never played with any mods before, I used the official in-game mods thing to try a few that seemed cool, consisting of:

Choose Your Scores
HairUnlocked
Immortal Scratch
ImpUI
PixellBytes' Adjustable Party Limit
PolyamoryFixes
Weightless Gold

Have to say it was a bit of a trip playing with an extra-sized party. Like killing the Hag on the main level of the tea house before she could even get to the basement/torture dungeon for the bit with the woman in the cage. But anyway...

Everything worked pretty great essentially all the way through to the end of Act 2. Had been a couple crashes, but they were just one-offs that didn't reoccur. Obviously, many hours of play time without any real trouble.

But then starting a couple days ago, right after I killed Ketheric Thorm, it's now so unstable that it will crash within a few minutes of loading the game. Nothing was changed on my end...either in terms of game options/mods or hardware. But the game is literally unplayable now, so I started trying to troubleshoot. Tried DX11 mode instead of Vulkan. Tried launching outside of Steam...with or without Admin. Started turning off mods...all the way down to just the hair one, since I wasn't sure what would happen if my characters suddenly didn't have their hair available. Nothing changed.

I also tried it on my laptop just now, which likewise hadn't run BG3 in a year or more. Crashes the same there. Which to me says that...I guess my actual saved game is somehow corrupt? I've managed a few times to make a quick save and re-load, but that doesn't make any difference either.

System specs on both machines are stout...and have no trouble running the game with everything maxed out. Desktop is Ryzen 7 7700X, RX 6950 XT, with 32Gb of RAM. Laptop is Ryzen 9, RTX 3070, 64Gb of RAM.

So...having expended all the frequently suggested "fix yoru crashing BG3" hints from all over the interweb, and even uninstalling and reinstalling the game completely, what else can I do? Everything had been going so great and I'd been really enjoying playing the game again, but if my game just simply won't play anymore I don't think I have it in me to start over... Would appreciate any thoughts anyone has.

[Motoman]

...and actually just for the sake of completeness, figured I'd better try with out any mods at all, so also went and deactivated the hair one. Same behavior...game loads up, you can run around and do stuff for a bit, but within a couple minutes *poof* gone.

[Motoman]

For giggles I went and played the save right before the Ketheric battle. Had no problems getting through that again...and then, after traveling through the portal after the fight, when talking to Aylin and she sees Isobel and there's that whole reuinion, then it crashed again. Something about that moment in the story...I guess as a combination of sorts with one or more mods...causing this issue.

[Motoman]

So...out of desperation I went back to the last save I had before jumping down the hole into the Illithid Colony. Before doing so, reduced my party size from 8 to 6 (which, yes, is still plenty of firepower...just a little less entertaining with fewer party members throwing zingers at each other all the time). One thing I'd noticed on all the attempts to continue after killing Ketheric and jumping in the portal to the surface was that the cut scene there would always start with Karlach acting like she wasn't in on that battle...even though she was there.

On a WAG that the PixellBytes' Adjustable Party Limit was the cause of the issue, I just cut the party down to 6, but still including Karlach, and this time after we killed Ketheric, the cut scene started with slightly different dialog for Karlach...indicating that she was there. And...seems like it has made the game stable? It was late last night when I did that so I didn't play too much longer after the cut scene...but in the past the game would *poof* within 2 minutes of that dialog finishing, so this time when it lasted for at least 15 mins thereafter I declared victory. Will give an update if that was premature. But for now, seems that having *too big* of a party with that party limit mod can cause a problem with that cut scene. Which honestly if there's a problem with the mod, really surprised it took that long to surface...because I'd been playing the whole game with it like that (adding each new companion I had until I had 8, at which point I figured that was plenty).