Fixing Issues With Skyrim Mods
(or, I broke horses, then fixed them)
Date:
[]
Categories:
[I Broke It (Then Fixed It)],
[Video Games],
[Skyrim]
This post was migrated from Cohost. It was originally posted June 19, 2023.
Well, specifically, some issues that I've run into with my latest save.
I was intending this to be a more broad overview of some cool tools I found while fixing something, but it's a bit hard to talk about them without talking about why I needed them. They aren't exclusive to the problem I was having so I hope these are able to help you!
I want to emphasize: It's generally a really bad idea to uninstall mods mid-playthrough. But, sometimes you run into issues, and you gotta.
I'm quite a few hours into this save (sweats), and ran into a conflict between two of my mods: Inigo and Immersive Horses. I'm not entirely sure why this happens, but every time I have a horse following me, Inigo refuses to follow me. It takes a solid 10 minutes of fiddling with follow / dismiss / wait / follow etc to make him follow me again. Couple that with him not being able to ride the horse I gave him and I just decided to get rid of Immersive Horses. Which, turns out, is really annoying - if you remove it, you can't interact with horses at all anymore. Which, uh. I would like to ride horsies. So that's unfortunate.
But I'm nothing if not determined. So I hopped into Skyrim, made a new save, backed those up just in case, went into Vortex and uninstalled Immsersive Horses. But we're not done yet. We gotta clean up after it.
Fallrim Tools ReSaver
This tool lets you pop open your save files and clean up broken / unused scripts and other stuff. It can do a lot more, but that's what we're going to be using it for. Check out its Nexus page for more details.
What I used it for here was very specific: Looking up Immersive Horses and deleting the ScriptInstances and ChangeForms folders. The mod is uninstalled in Vortex, yes, but this cleans up the save so that the scripts don't keep trying to run or anything. This video's helpful for demonstrating where to find what I'm talking about (I don't like video guides, but the UI can be a little daunting, so it's actually kind of helpful here. He's removing AFT, but the concept is the same)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GNpeke61XY
When saving your file, I recommend using Save As and not saving over the save you just edited. I increment the save name so I can identify it easier in Skyrim (e.g. Save 1 -> Save 2). This is partly to avoid overwriting a working save, and partly to avoid bugs (I ran into a couple when I did this the first time, not sure if this is exactly why, but can't hurt).
Unblocker
Original SSE Port has more detailed usage instructions - Patched Version fixes a conversion issue
When you remove Immersive Horses, something breaks with being able to interact with horses. You can mash interact all you want and nothing happens. This is apparently a relatively common issue with the game, even outside of uninstalling mods - something breaks and you just can't activate specific items anymore.
Unblocker is a tool that runs while you're in-game. Install it, boot the game, stand next to the broken item(s), and let it work for a second. You'll see notifications in the corner of the screen as it's working. It might take it a few seconds to detect and fix the blocked object. You can then test to see if it's fixed by interacting with the object. When you're done, you can sneak (pauses the tool), save your game, exit, and uninstall the tool (it's not meant to be constantly installed, only when you need to fix something).
After I ran these two cleanup tools, I was able to ride horses normally. I replaced Immersive Horses with Simple Horses (adds some very simple horse control things, like a whistle). Inigo's horse is MIA, which I expected and plan to fix later, but Simple Horses has a "spawn a horse for my follower when I ride" option that seems to be working in the meantime.
Anyway, I hope this helps! Good luck!