Always CTD around/in Whiterun
 

My game may be permadead. Out of nowhere (i.e. I made no changes to the game or mods), Skyrim does a CTD when I try to fast travel to Whiterun or if I walk within view.

I've tried all the suggestions on the Steam forums, including disabling all mods and texture packs, reducing resolution and graphics settings, updating video drivers, validated game file(s), etc… All with no success. Any ideas appreciated! Otherwise, it's going to be any early retirement for my Nord warrior who will never finish the companions questline… :(

Strange. Have you tried perhaps going indoors somewhere and resting for a month straight to reset outdoor spawns?

It's worth a try. Thanks! How does one rest for a month straight? Looks like the limit is 1 day.

Just sit there and click the button 30x :P Be sure to be indoors.

Ah that's gonna cost a lot of gold at the inn. Maybe there is a bed in town I can use for free. I suppose I can wait for 30 days. ;)

OK, I tried your suggestion Drithius. While it was a great idea, it still crashed after 30+ days off waiting in a shop.

Then I hit the side of my head, tried something else, and it worked.

What is the FIRST thing a player should try when he gets repeated crashes? Somehow I forgot the obvious approach to fixing these sorts of bugs… I suppose I wanted to keep the orcish armor I just salvaged off an attacking Breton. ;)

Don't follow ya - are you saying some armor you looted was making you crash?

Not the armor per se (but who knows?). Just wondering if the obvious solution is obvious to others or if I am being to hard on myself. ;)

I'll hazard a wild guess and say he means reverting to a prior save…

Bingo! So that should have been the first thing I tried, right? Rather than trolling the Steam forums for elaborate and ultimately not helpful solutions…

Odd bug though… I wonder what caused it… Are you sure it wasn't some missing resources ? (i.e tried a mod that you disabled in the interim or something)…

Yep , I tried all permutations of enabled/disabled mods (I am only running with two community mods + one half of the hi def texture pack), to no avail. I also was paranoid that Steam had stealth patched Skyrim and made it incompatible with my mods. Nope, not patched. Turns out it was just a corrupted world instance. SOMETHING was not right in or around Whiterun.

The resources are in the Steam directory, right? So going to a different save shouldn't change the resources, just the references? Perhaps a resource reference in my world instance had a corrupted index, or some such?

Who can say, I assume that is possible… I do know they are keeping state for every object in the world (remember the PS3 related save controversy)…

Also, now that I think about it, the game actually warns you when trying to load a save with missing resources so my suggestion was probably off anyways…

Actually, the first thing one should try is rebooting your computer if reloading your latest save doesn't work (I did that at least, ;) )

Well you may at least find comfort to the fact that you had a save to go back to.
I usually play games just with the quicksave for hours and hours until I remember to keep an intermediary save, just for safety's sake…

(Did remember to save my progress in Risen 1 to a different save tonight for some reason ;) )

I am a compulsive saver just for these kinds of situations (I regularly save before EVERY area transition/fast travel). Major brain fart not to try this earlier. BTW, my Skyrim save directory = 1.41 GB… Some cleaning is in order.

i think my save folder was around 20GB after the month or so of playing it upon release…

Ah! OK, so if I have problems around Whiterun, the solution is to hit Thrasher upside the head. Got it. ;)

I've actually had a couple of game saves corrupt. When I reload, everyone's skin is perfectly black. I actually did think to re-load an earlier save but, when I did, the skin was still all wrong! It turned out that my old saves were actually just fine but I had to quit completely out of the game and then load the old save.

Moral of the story: don't just load up an old save. Quit, restart, THEN load the old save.