Resolved Xbox ROTC Crashes in Settlements

[Humble Cudgel]

I have been running the full 2 GB of mods on Xbox, and when I first installed Sim Settlements, followed by ROTC two days later, things were still running smoothly. Now that the settlements have grown in size (although no settlements have been upgraded to level 2 yet) I have started to experience crashes, particularly in Sanctuary. I had tried all the performance options, even running only 1, 2, and 3 thread limits, and crashes still continued.

I could not refresh a settlement without the game crashing. The game would always crash after only a couple of lots being refreshed. Now, I have disabled "Another Green Mod - Desaturated" and I was able to refresh Sanctuary completely without the game crashing. So now my question is, could the answer to the crashes have been a simple overload of the system, even when turning off all the performance options and running as little as a 1 thread limit, or could there be a compatibility issue between Sim Settlements/ROTC and Another Green Mod?

 

[Humble Cudgel]

Actually, the crashes are still continuing. Now I did a clean save out of SS and ROTC, and upon re-enabling them and restarting the settlements, the crashes keep occurring, even in level 0 settlements, with max 2 threads and no multi-thread building. I tried reverting back to a save before I had ever installed SS or ROTC and I had never experienced any crashes but sure enough the crashes started up again, when in settlements. It even happened with as little as 4 settlers in Hangman's Alley level 0. I have multiple settlements being built with leaders (Sanctuary, Hangman's Alley, Oberland Station, Castle, Greenstop Nursery, County Crossing). Could the number of settlements being controlled by ROTC have something to do with the crashes, or should settlements that you are not within or anywhere near have nothing to do with game performance?

List of Mods after deleting "Another Green Mod":
Total size: 1.68 GB

Scrap Everything (though I haven't scrapped or crafted any items since initializing SS and ROTC, which scraps everything itself)
USO Base Game
Armor and Weapon Keywords Community Resource
True Storms: Wasteland Edition
Sim Settlements
Rise of The Commonwealth
Sim Settlements - Crash Fix
Real Nights with Real Lights
Ponytail Hairstyles by Azara
TLS Realistic Gunfire
Everyone's Best Friend
Armorsmith Extended
Camera Presets
Companion Tracker
Crossbows of The Commonwealth
Cut Weapon Mods Restored
D.C. Glory
CZ75B Standalone Pistol
Outfield Retreat - Player Home
English - Full Dialogue Options
Visible Weapons
Visible Weapons Part 2
Get Down - No more surprises
Goodfellow's Glorified Goodneighbor
Hunting Shotgun
K-9 Harness
Normal Compass for Survival
No Legendary Spawns
IPS-2LM Presents: Wearable Backpacks
Power Armor Night Vision
Phylight Vanilla Only
Place Anywhere (as mentioned, I haven't touched/crafted/moved anything in settlements since enabling SS and ROTC)
Pleasing Piper Attitude Adjustment
NCR Veteran Ranger Armor
Veteran Ranger Armor 1st Person Fix
Realistic Headshots
Realistic Insect Health
Survival Options
Tactical Weapon Mods
Take Cover
Valdacil's Item Sorting
Realistic Bullets: Velocity
Right Handed Hunting Rifle
Femshepping's Autumn Fashion
Sniper's of the Commonwealth
Simple Male Redux
Visible Galaxy 4k Dim
Crimsomrider's Accessories
Real Metal PA frames
Shezrie's Loft
Arturo's Shooting Range
Hide Pip Boy
APEX Better Hunting Rifle
Assault Carbine
Alternate AR15 Sounds
disable character lights
CROSS Jetpack
Minutemen NCR Overhaul - Weapons
Sanctuary Hot Springs Home
Busty EV Body Replacer
Cheat Terminal
NPCs Travel
Fallout 4 FPS Overdrive (just saw this at the bottom of my load order, could this be the culprit?)

 

[Humble Cudgel]

I turned off all mods except SS, ROTC, and the SS television crash fix mod, and the crashes seemed to be gone although I didn't play very long, just fast traveled between settlements that typically caused the crashes like Sanctuary and Hangman's Alley, and long enough that I figured a crash would have occurred by then, and nothing. So it seemed my system was either overloaded or there were compatibility issues with mods. I disabled True Storms to start troubleshooting one mod at a time, and the crashes are less now, with some freezing and going before freezing again and ultimately crashing to the Xbox's main menu. Is Sim Settlements and ROTC just not stable enough on Xbox? I don't believe I have many system heavy mods that would be overloading the system leading to these crashes. I REALLY want to get this to work because Sim Settlements completely revolutionized this game to make it what it should have been from the start.

 

[kinggath]

Sim Settlements is in a pretty stable place - what's kind of unstable on Xbox is the settlement system itself. Since everything seems to work for you with your other mods disabled, I think you'll have to keep testing removing mods until you can either determine a particular one that was causing your crashes - or get your load order down to a point that Xbox can handle it.

 

[Humble Cudgel]

Sim Settlements is in a pretty stable place - what's kind of unstable on Xbox is the settlement system itself. Since everything seems to work for you with your other mods disabled, I think you'll have to keep testing removing mods until you can either determine a particular one that was causing your crashes - or get your load order down to a point that Xbox can handle it.

Tried going through the mods by trial and error to locate the ones, if any, that were causing the crashes. It appears that while SS and ROTC may in fact be stable mods, they appear to push the Xbox to its limits when within the settlements. Just adding in my weapon mods and armor mods and disabling all other mods still causes the game to freeze when in settlements and CTD.

I found a viable compromise. I used ROTC to allow the settlers to build up the settlements without ever visiting the settlements during this process (speeding up the game clock to hasten the process) and then I clean saved out ROTC and kept SS and continued building the settlement myself. Now I can visit the settlements without ROTC running the background and this seems to avoid the crashes, but I'll post an update if crashes start up again.

 

[Humble Cudgel]

I thank you for the excellent mod though. You outdid Bethesda , although they kinda did it to themselves with the so many questionable decisions they made with this otherwise excellent game. SS and ROTC would probably run impeccably on a high end gaming PC.

 

[tankthing]

Just fyi, weapons and armor mods are notorious for causing random crashing. best answer is to remove any you arent actually using.

 

[Humble Cudgel]

Just fyi, weapons and armor mods are notorious for causing random crashing. best answer is to remove any you arent actually using.

I wish that were the case but don't have any mods I don't use, and I never experience any crashes/freezing, aside from the crashes in settlements since installing SS and ROTC. I think I rather keep my mods and figure out a way to work around the settlement crashes. Although you have created an amazingly revolutionary mod in the way the settlement system works (for which Bethesda should recruit you to implement this in their next game, and once you're working for them please remind them that they should get rid of the character lighting ), its still only a part of FO4, and I rather focus on enjoying the rest of it. As you said yourself in one of your videos, SS and ROTC are meant to allow you to enjoy the rest FO4 while you settlements build themselves instead of devoting hours to settlement building.

 

[tankthing]

I wish that were the case but don't have any mods I don't use, and I never experience any crashes/freezing, aside from the crashes in settlements since installing SS and ROTC. I think I rather keep my mods and figure out a way to work around the settlement crashes. Although you have created an amazingly revolutionary mod in the way the settlement system works (for which Bethesda should recruit you to implement this in their next game, and once you're working for them please remind them that they should get rid of the character lighting ), its still only a part of FO4, and I rather focus on enjoying the rest of it. As you said yourself in one of your videos, SS and ROTC are meant to allow you to enjoy the rest FO4 while you settlements build themselves instead of devoting hours to settlement building.

So what you're saying is that you found a conflict with weapons and armor mods and the added overhead by Sim Settlements is enough to crash your system.

Unfortunately you've already found that by releasing more resources back to the system, it works without issue. This means that you've got a choice of either reducing the number of mods loaded below whatever threshold is causing your crash or abandoning Sim Settlements. Alternatives to this are upgrade to a better Xbox with more resources or go PC.

Sim Settlements can overload even very powerful systems and I don't see this changing with community based plans done by builders who lack the resources to do the optimization steps we're slowly slogging through to test and retest FPS on low end machines until the settlements function correctly in all tested cases.

It's disappointing that this is the case but all indications are that you're overloading your system. I'm not sure what else we can do to help you with it. Sim Settlements is very large and does many things. In a resource constrained environment it's on the user to figure out what is worth it.

For the record, I'm not Kinggath
He's the one that owns the mod and who has been releasing all the videos. I'm just a volunteer helping out here and there.

 

[Humble Cudgel]

So what you're saying is that you found a conflict with weapons and armor mods and the added overhead by Sim Settlements is enough to crash your system.

Unfortunately you've already found that by releasing more resources back to the system, it works without issue. This means that you've got a choice of either reducing the number of mods loaded below whatever threshold is causing your crash or abandoning Sim Settlements. Alternatives to this are upgrade to a better Xbox with more resources or go PC.

Sim Settlements can overload even very powerful systems and I don't see this changing with community based plans done by builders who lack the resources to do the optimization steps we're slowly slogging through to test and retest FPS on low end machines until the settlements function correctly in all tested cases.

It's disappointing that this is the case but all indications are that you're overloading your system. I'm not sure what else we can do to help you with it. Sim Settlements is very large and does many things. In a resource constrained environment it's on the user to figure out what is worth it.

For the record, I'm not Kinggath
He's the one that owns the mod and who has been releasing all the videos. I'm just a volunteer helping out here and there.

Yes, agreed, please don't take any offense, SS and ROTC are great. After all the trouble shooting I realized it's just the system being overloaded, nothing to do with stability of the mods themselves. Unfortunately I'm on an Xbox One S instead of the improved Xbox One X, which judging by the degree of the CTDs, I think the One X's hardware improvements could probably handle the load.

I do think that the work-around I am trying is working well so far, which is to let SS and ROTC run in the background without ever visiting the settlements until they've upgrade to level 2 and then clean saving out of ROTC and continuing to run the base Sim Settlements, at which point I seem capable of visiting settlements without crashing. I may have misstated before, but the crashing only started after installing ROTC, not the base Sim Settlements. I had been using Sim settlements along with all my other mods without crashing. Adding on ROTC seems to have been what pushed my system over its limits.

Thanks again for the responses.