Workarounds for Mechanist Bugs

[Monomyth]

Workarounds for Mechanist Bugs

Just finished The Mechanist DLC, and while fun, I spent more time troubleshooting and working around bugs than I did in game.

Here are the things I ran into, and how I solved them.

tl;dr:
1: Use nVidia driver 362; the other two newer versions are trash
2: If the final fight gets stuck, noclip into the floor to find missing enemies
3: If exiting the final zone crashes the game, you may need to teleport to a settlement to leave the final zone


1: nVidia Drivers
I had not played Fallout 4 in about two months when The Mechanist DLC was released, and was not paying attention to the drivers for my GTX-980Ti.

Within the first hour of in-game time, the Fallout 4 app was causing my screen to go black, requiring a reset. After the third time this happened in the same night, I started pinging my PC from my laptop to see how bad Windows 7 was crashing. Sure enough, pings stopped coming back after each crash, which led me to find these crashes were really silent BSODs.

I used BlueScreenView to look at the minidumps created during the crashes, converted the dump to an XP Style BSOD, and saw a super generic error:

"The problem seems to be caused by the following file: hal.dll"

I started noticing the same kind of silent BSODs happening in another game "R.U.S.E." which has been extremely stable for years, and some screensavers would crash in the same way, so it seemed this was not a problem with Fallout 4, but a problem with my system.

Some suggested maybe some mods from Nexus were causing the problem, so I disabled all of them and tried again. Same thing.

Then I tried taking the easy way out and installing the latest driver for my GTX, but this made the problem much much worse. Now the BSODs happened more often, and eventually my PC would not even boot up.

I pulled the GTX and replaced it with an older Sapphire card from another PC, booted into Windows Safe Mode, and removed ALL video drivers from my system, using "Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU)", then ran CCLeaner to remove any stray entries in my registry.

The GTX was re-installed, and booted into Safe Mode as a sanity check, which worked fine. Rebooted into normal mode, and downloaded driver "362.00", which was a known good version for me.

Here are the latest drivers on the nVidia website:

GeForce Game Ready Driver WHQL 364.72 March 28, 2016 # Garbage
GeForce Game Ready Driver WHQL 364.51 March 8, 2016 # Terrible
GeForce Game Ready Driver WHQL 362.00 March 1, 2016 # Good

Fallout 4 once again was stable, even with all mods enabled,and I have not had any crashes of any kind since installing driver 362.


2: Final Mission Stuck
Fast forward several enjoyable hours of play time later, and I am at the last location for The Mechanist DLC quest line. I will not spoil anything, but for me the problem was a certain vey event was not happening which would move the story to its *final* conversation. When there is no more fight and you hear the same announcements over and over with no action no matter how long you wait, this is the bug I am referring to here. If you've seen it you know what I'm talking about.

The problem is that that it is possible for some of the enemies in the final scene to not actually make it into the visible area you are in, and until you defeat all enemies, that round of action will not end and you're stuck in a locked zone with no way to get out.

Using the console, I enabled NoClip mode via: ~ (get into console), "tcl"

I found an enemy still stuck in each sub-floor spawn point chamber. Look under the floor in NoClip mode and you will see the little chambers I'm talking about. You will have to carefully noclip in to the tiny rooms and kill the enemies there. This will unstick the game and you can complete the quest.


3: Exiting Lair Crashes to Desktop
After looting the entire lair zone, I was ready to go back home to Sanctuary, because I know Cait would be worried.

When exiting the lair, the loading screen would animate and the music would play, but as soon as the loader was over, Fallout 4 would crash to desktop.

This is likely happening because the Mechanist DLC is expecting some values in an ini file which was modified by a mod.

Threads here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/377160/discussions/0/392184342871197878/
http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1598644-a-lot-of-crashing-after-completing-quest/

I worked around this by teleporting directly to Sanctuary with the console command:
"coc Sanctuaryext " (without the quotes)


Hopefully this will help others get through this otherwise great DLC.

[DroneFrost]

Ok so I have the #2 problem and there are no robots in any of those sub-floor spawn points. Nothing in the air, vents, doors, or anything else. I know a command to kill all things but I don't want to kill the mechanist and I don't have the old save but still I heard that it won't fix it. Can you or someone you know tell me how to fix this?

[ronr42]

Originally posted by ☣Purple☠Death☣:

Ok so I have the #2 problem and there are no robots in any of those sub-floor spawn points. Nothing in the air, vents, doors, or anything else. I know a command to kill all things but I don't want to kill the mechanist and I don't have the old save but still I heard that it won't fix it. Can you or someone you know tell me how to fix this?

I don't know about that OP's issue or his fix for #2.

Here's what happened in my game right after Automatron was released. I finally destroyed the last of the waves of robots and the Mechanist dialogue started. I kept waiting for the Mechanist to come down from the control room and never did. I walked around to the ramp that will extend down to let you enter the control room and when I moved slowly around under where the ramp comes down the dialogue continued and the Mech. lowered the ramp so I could enter the control room.

I hope this helps.

[DroneFrost]

Well i fixed it now thnx to the game saving it about the half the way i was so i just used the comand to get to the end and done. It was fixed this time i played.