Random crashes to desktop

[VFX]

Yes, another one of those topics. I remember a couple of years back when I was doing the achievement run for this game, I would constantly (and I mean constantly) get booted from the game to Windows at random, either on being killed, when walking casually down the Commonwealth, shooting or interacting with others. It was impossible to pinpoint the exact reason why the crashes happened, they just did. And this was happening on a clean game (achievement run, so no mods, not even the unofficial FO4 patch).

Fast forward to this year and I thought I'd give it another go, only this time I would do it with mods. The first mod that I installed was the FO4 patch. Although I wouldn't crash to desktop as often as I did in my unmodded game, I would still crash at random events. So I downloaded more performance-related mods, specifically the High FPS Physics Fix and the Weapon Debris Crash Fix, while also toning down on graphics settings. The performance of the game improved significantly, crashes happen less often... but they still happen. So I removed those mods, loaded the save from all those years ago and started crashing to desktop much more often than with mods. I also tried starting a completely new game without mods, no luck, the frequency of crashes is much worse than with the performance mods above.

Does anyone have any idea what else could be tweaked or is this beyond repair?

My specs (not that it matters, but still):

Intel i7-7700K 4.20 GHz
32 GB DDR4 RAM
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 16GB
Windows 10 Pro x64

[Iron Knights]

I have a good setup and stable PC, vanilla never EVER crashed on me.

[Iron Knights]

Mods but especially those dumb .exe files from nextrus are causes of most CTDs.

[VFX]

Iron Knights původně napsal:

Mods are the primary reasons for CTDs, especially random, I don't know other causes.

"So I removed those mods, loaded the save from all those years ago and started crashing to desktop much more often than with mods. I also tried starting a completely new game without mods, no luck, the frequency of crashes is much worse than with the performance mods above."

[merusalem]

I found that two factors prevented the game from crashing for me. Like, ever:
- I never load an Exitsave, only manual saves, or in Survival sleep-saves.
- Understanding about the engine's limit regarding the max count of people per settlement and how the game processes deletions to a settlement and constructed objects helped a lot:

https://www.simsettlements.com/site/index.php?threads/understanding-ctds-in-the-triangle-of-death-sanctuary-abernathy-farm-and-red-rocket.6964/

Mods that are blamed by some for crashing the game, like Start Me Up, on the other hand, turned out to be harmless for me, considering these two limitations.

[CalWheats]

I could only use start me up to actually play the game lol. Until i lowered my res to get past the start at least

[VFX]

merusalem původně napsal:

I found that two factors prevented the game from crashing for me. Like, ever:
- I never load an Exitsave, only manual saves, or in Survival sleep-saves.
- Understanding about the engine's limit regarding the max count of people per settlement and how the game processes deletions to a settlement and constructed objects helped a lot:

https://www.simsettlements.com/site/index.php?threads/understanding-ctds-in-the-triangle-of-death-sanctuary-abernathy-farm-and-red-rocket.6964/

Mods that are blamed by some for crashing the game, like Start Me Up, on the other hand, turned out to be harmless for me, considering these two limitations.

So if I understand that thread right, the game is basically a ticking time bomb where you will eventually crash to desktop no matter how many (if any) mods you have on your PC. This on one hand doesn't make sense because like I said in my initial post, I get CTD much, much more often in games without mods (after 10-15 minutes of gameplay) than I do in games with mods (can play 2-3 hours in one sitting before crashing). And because I get kicked less frequently from games with mods, then this means that my modded game has more scripts to run and calculate, which means I should be getting more frequent CTDs, right?

Don't get me wrong, this was a very interesting read and the author has very interesting and valid points, but it just doesn't make sense for what I have seen in my games.

[Iron Knights]

Then your PC is unstable and need to fix that first, before even questioning anything else.

[Iron Knights]

What frequency did you set your XMP for RAM to ?

[Iron Knights]

What MB do you have ? What are your PSU specs. ?

[Iron Knights]

Do you save to the cloud ? Get rid of that, space is small and you run out soon.

[VFX]

It's definitely not the PSU because if it was, then I wouldn't be crashing to desktop, my computer would reset instead. I have the ASUS Rog Strix 750W.

My operating RAM speed is at 2400 MHz, and my mobo is the ASRock Z270 Pro4.

I highly doubt my PC is unstable because Fallout 4 is the only game I am having problems with, and on medium settings at that, with no shadows and playing in borderless window mode at 48 fps.

[Iron Knights]

There's one problem, windowed mode. No game plays better in windowed mode than Full Screen. Not only you'd get better FPS but you prevent windows from switching GPUs if you have an integrated one (could disable in Bios). Your setup seems ok, but you need to do one or both, the intel HD 630 GPU your processor is pushing is just in the way.

[Iron Knights]

Now that we put hardware out of the way, let's check your software setup. WIndows first.
Do you run off SSD or HDD ? Do you have pagefile on or off ? (should be off with that much RAM), Do you have indexing off for your drives ? Do you have windows search off ? (both should be off)

[Iron Knights]

Third and not least, monitor vertical refresh frequency, sync setup in drivers, FPS cap.

[VFX]

Okay, after 10 days without a single CTD, this is what I did.

My machine is more than capable of running Fallout 4 on ultra settings. Still, I downed down these settings to Low (especially shadows) and capped FPS at 48. The game would still crash.

I googled for a tool that would log these crashes, and stumbled upon Buffout 4 (available at Nexus). Followed the installation instructions and when the first CTD happened, Buffout created a log for me, and in it I had the error "EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (code)", while further down the list under STACK it said that it failed to load the mesh for "Hairbrush". Which led me to believe that every time I would stumble upon the "hairbrush" in the game, it would crash to desktop because it wouldn't be able to load that mesh (that's my interpretation).

Now, I had already verified the game integrity at this point and I had no mods installed that would even touch the hairbrush mesh, yet the game would still crash on me because of it. I googled further and found the second best mod for this game, Wyre Bash for Fallout 4. It's basically a file conflict management tool, which I downloaded, ran, had it "patch" up the game for me and I have not had a single CTD ever since, not even after playing the game for 10 hours straight, travelling all over the map, picking up all sorts of items and killing basically all types of enemies. I tried the same "fix" with my heavily modded save game - zero crashes!

So if anyone is having CTDs either with or without mods, try installing Buffout 4 to generate a crash log, read the log (if you don't know what the log is about, you can download the FO4 Scanner (also available on Nexus) to interpret the items there), and giving Wyre Bash a go.