missing spell effect on hand leads to crash

The spell effect goes missing from time to time.
It is missing in 1st and 3rd person.
It seems to happen with any spell.

When this happens, I know the game will crash but only if:

  • I have no hands with the spell that has missing effect (I can have both hands with it, but as soon I have none, like equipping a 2handed, the game crashes).
  • I quit to main screen.
  • I try to load a game.

My game is heavily moded on PC.
I have started a new game.
I have used TES5Edit to create a merged patch.

Papyrus shows nothing special on logs.

[Papyrus]
bEnableLogging=1
bEnableTrace=1
bLoadDebugInformation=1

SKSE ini should be fixing most problems.

[General]
ClearInvalidRegistrations=1

I also use ENBoost, so my initial guess it is not graphics related.

What would you do to try to solve this?


Solution 1:

Well... since your question boils down to "What would you do to try to solve this?" the answer would be:

  1. Backup your save data and keep them safe somewhere
  2. Start a new game with no mods active. This is the clean, vanilla save you'll use frequently, so back it up too
  3. Activate all the mods you use in the troublesome game, if one of them is the culprit the problem should also appear in your new game
  4. If it does appear, try to turn off your mods binary-search-style:
    • Turn off half of your mods and load the clean save. If the problem appears, then the culprit is somewhere between the active half, if not then the culprit is somewhere between the non-active half
    • Repeat the above step with the half where the culprit is, until you pin it down to the problematic one
  5. Deal with the culprit

Sometimes the problem is not because of a particular mod, but rather because of the way it interacts with another mod, causing conflict. In this case you'll need to turn off your mods one by one and load the clean save to find out which mods that potentially cause problems