Mod Interactions - Potential Conflicts and Issues

[kinggath]

Just because a mod shows up in this list does not mean it should not be used, only that there are potential issues that could crop up when using them. These issues are not necessarily limited to impacting Watchtower, and are listed here to help folks understand how mods can interact with each other in strange ways.

Please read the details for each and do not assume this is an incompatibility list!

Cheat Terminal

While in general this mod is fine to use, some of it's utilities are very intensive. In particular, it's God Mode implementation is extremely script intensive and can cause catastrophic amounts of lag. The more combat and effects your character is under, the larger this problem becomes. It will manifest in fully blocking many quests from proceeding.

Human Activity on Earth

While not yet verified, we've had reports that this mod can block one of the last scenes in our quest Last Watch. Without spoilers, there is an optional sequence that looks extremely distinct visually with a black and white filter over it. If you find that this sequence fails to function or your screen ends up completely blacked out, and are using this mod, please create a post to let us know!

Auto Complete Temples

If you run into an issue during the quest Last Watch, without spoilers there is a scene towards the very end with a black and white filter over the screen, where Torin will fail to do what he says he's going to do and the objectives will not continue, it may be this mod. There appears to be an esp file called "auto complete temples.esp" out in the wild that we've been unable to locate a mod page for (If you know where this mod lives, please make a post to let us know!).

Iconic Ship Battles: Ship Tech Test

While not yet verified, we've had reports that this mod can cause an instant crash to desktop when the game is loaded.

 

[kinggath]

Help Us Crush Mod Conflicts!

I want to make a general post here as well about mod conflicts.

We've had a near 10 year long team policy of taking great care to avoid editing records in the base game so that our stuff can be compatible with as many things as possible. We want you to be able to run all the mods you like together in harmony!

That said, if you are running a huge load order, there are inevitably going to be things that clash between mods that will need to be sorted. Not all authors take the same care to avoid editing base records, and some mod types are best handled by editing those base records - and those things can have negative consequences on other mods.

We'll do our best to address incompatibilities from our side as they are identified.

The hard part is the identification.

If you come to us with a bug, and a 100 plus mod load order, we're going to need help picking it apart to figure out the most likely cause of these issues.



There are a few things you can do to help figure out where the conflict is occurring, some of these things are simple, and others will take more effort, but the more details we have, the more likely we can actually make all of your mods compatible!

1. Post your load order, on PC, this can be your plugins.txt file which can be found by hitting the Windows key and typing %userprofile%, pushing enter, and then navigating to the subfolders: AppData\Local\Starfield. On Xbox, you can go to the Creations screen and then press the Load Order button and take a series of pictures of the mods listed.

While this doesn't necessarily identify the problem, it ensures that both our team, and other players can start to look for patterns - ie. which mods are showing up frequently in similar reports.

2. Search the forums for similar problems and engage with those users. If multiple of you discuss the problem, you may be able to sus out more specifics together of things you are both doing to trigger the issue at hand.

3. If you are fairly certain you know what mods are conflicting, try to create reproducible steps with only a those mods installed. Once you have these steps and load order, we can recreate the issue on our side and try and create a workaround.

4. Try reproducing the issue on a new save, Bethesda save files are notoriously unstable and will become buggy over time and Starfield's are no exception. If you're on PC, you can download vanilla-only saves at various points in the main game, such as after the Vectera sequence or even after all vanilla quests are complete, to speed this process.



If you are newish to using mods, or haven't gotten deep into troubleshooting load orders before, this video, while old and not directly related to Starfield, has some valuable insights into some of the problems we all have learned to deal with when building big load orders.

We're committed to helping you guys as best as we can, and look forward to finding and destroying as many incompatibilities as we can! With your help, we can get there even faster!

-kinggath