Crashing whenever I get near Lost Knife Hideout

[jordanjmastera]

Skyrim crashes whenever I get somewhat close to Lost Knife Hideout, regardless of whether I'm trying to fast travel or just walk there. This includes come of the nearby places like Fort Amol, etc.
I noticed the issue when I got a new quest leading me to Lost Knife Hideout - which was already cleared. I tried an earlier save, before I got that quest, but the issue persisted.

I've tried to follow the Troubleshooting guide here - admittedly some of it is over my head. But here are my specs and what I've tried:

I have the Special Edition. I guess it came with creator club too. I don't have any mods installed - at least nothing that wasn't included with the SE download via Steam. I've been playing this game on the same computer with the same setup for a year now, with no issues. I've obviously been to Lost Knife before, cause it's marked as cleared.

I'm running a PC with Ryzen 5600, 32 GB DDR4 RAM, RX 6700XT, with Windows 10. Skyrim is installed on the C: drive, which is a 1TB M.2 drive with 50GB free. Steam and Windows are automatically updated but I confirmed they are both currently up-to-date.

Checked drivers and ran the AMD driver update tool
Restarted PC several times
New install of Skyrim - but held onto the save files
Did 'Verify integrity of game files' within Steam
Tried CHKDSK in Command Prompt. No apparent issues.
Tried SFC Scan in Command Prompt. That did yield an issue with a .dll file but frankly I have no idea what that means, even after googling for a while. Most of the results I found cited false positives anyway.
Ran Windows Security scans several times; no issues.
Tried changing sound settings (per troubleshooting guide).

None of these seemed to impact the issue. I can fast travel, or just walk, to seemingly any other areas of Skyrim and Solstheim - I tested probably 20 or 30 different locations. I don't experience any lag, any graphics issues, or any other gameplay problems until I get close to Lost Knife Hideout.
I tried earlier saves but can't find one where this bug isn't present.

Any ideas?

[CEPHY]

Start a new save and try going directly to Lost Knife.

If it crashes before you get there, trying using console commands to teleport inside (probably going to be be comething like "coc lostknifehideoutinterior". If it doesn't crash inside, but when you leave, there's something within the exterior cell causing you to crash.

As to figuring out what that something is... well, if you're not running any mods, that's gonna be hard to answer.

[jordanjmastera]

Not sure how to reply to a comment, but I tried a new save and it crashed a couple times randomly while walking to Lost Knife Hideout. No issues, just exited the game back to the desktop both times. I reloaded and continued, and got to Lost Knife. No issues there - I could go inside, walk around, leave, etc.

Then I went back to my main game and tried fast traveling to Lost Knife but it immediately crashed. I tried an earlier save from that game - same issue.

It's pretty annoying to buy a game only for it to break for no reason with no mods and no other computer issues.

[Malkiah]

Maybe your M.2 drive is simply full to the point where accessing certain bits of data takes so long that windows considers it a crash and kills the program? I would recommend clearing some space on that drive because drives that are more than 80% full can sometimes lead to various random issues, the main one usually being lower/unstable performance.

[jordanjmastera]

I'll give that a try. Though I have to imagine even the slowest M.2 drive can run Skyrim. Seems like my hardware should be overkill for a game from 2011, remastered in 2016. But it's a good idea and I'll give it a shot. Thanks.

Fortunately I did find a save where I can go to Lost Knife - unfortunately it's from almost a year ago and I'd lose 35 levels of progress by reverting to that save.

I did open a ticket with Bethesda - we'll see if/how they respond.

[Eternie]

How many saves do you have?
Having too many saves can slow game start and loading games.
Delete saves that you know you don't need.

The reason for crashing in one place could be a large variety of things ... like you destroyed a lot of people, critters, or blasted items into strange places such that the game struggles to remember where they all are.

One mod that fixes most vanilla bugs is the unofficial patch and is recommended to most to fix issues your having in game.

The other thing is if a certain area is giving you issues like this then it may be time to reset skyrim by actually sleeping for a month in an internal bedroom. So head to a bedroom and yes sleep.
Use ESC key look at bottom note the date and sleep until a month has past.

After sleeping for a month save the game, I'd suggest use console open with ~
save SleptForMonth enter (will give a name in save menu ) or
save "slept for a Month" enter
Close console ~
Open game saves to make sure your save is there.
Then exit game reboot computer and go back to Skyrim
Although you'll want to head to Lost knife Hideout I's still recommend doing other quests first and when approaching Lost knife go really slow stop and pause often allow the game to run scripts and do checks in back ground.

Hope that all helps

[smr1957]

You say you have no mods installed, but did you ever at any point have mods? Because that could be causing the issue - and especially if at any point on this game, you may have installed a mod and removed it without rolling back to a save made before the mods was installed. And even if no mods were ever installed on this playthrough, there may still be files left over from a previous playthrough. Another thing could be if you ever used certain console commands to that may have bypassed triggers or eliminated necessary NPCs. And the final possibility is your FPS, which should be capped at 60. If it is not, and it is sceeding that, that may also result in problems.

Eternie gave some good suggestions (provided that none of the above applies - which would require more drastic action - and very likely, as new game), so use those as a starting point - maybe all that is needed is for the game to reset. But, if not, then there are other things that can be tried.

Good luck!