I've decided, I'm actually going to do it. I'm going to do the thing I vowed never to do again. The enormity of the project, the ridiculousness of the action. It's really gonna happen. Thousands of hours played, countless nights without sleep. Yes, I'm going to do it again......I'm starting over.

The game froze on me a while back after 1,800hrs of play. The following things I believe created the permanent freeze.

1. I camped too much with every single power that would let me strap a rubber band to he controller and walk away. This time around I will do this, but far less, and only when I really need to get another perk. Instead of redoing heavy armor 400+ times to get level 300.
2. I filled my homes(a lot of homes) with tons and tons of stuff, I filled barrels of so many things. I have decided to limit this to only the basics. 9-10 sets of armor for various uses, and some favs....... Same with weapons. No more thousands of food, potions(maybe lots of herbs, don't know yet)
3. I saved over the same file over and over again, read to make a new save every time I save.

Can you help me to figure out other ways to keep my file up and running? I don't know if I will have the energy to do near %100 of all missions(when I say %100 I mean the whole Skyrim walkthrough book cover to cover), but if I do go for it, I don't want to have to worry about it. I want this to last until Elder Scrolls VI

Never overwrite a save. Always make a new one.

Make sure that any stray items that are dropped, even those dropped by NPCs, get placed into something which will respawn. Dead bodies are great for this. Gross, but true. The (vanilla) game does not respawn items, which means it has to 'remember' anything that gets dropped, and all this memory adds up. So start a policy, if you haven't already, of placing these items into something which will respawn.

What platform are you on, by the way? PC? Xbox? PS3?

I don't get how some people play their games like they're a job.

What do you mean? Maybe the OP will enjoy restarting.

PS3

And maybe I won't start a new game. Tried 3 times and froze on load screen each time. I uninstalled the update and re-installed it and still freezing.

Thankfully, I've learned that lesson a loooong time ago back in Morrowind, I was about 100 hours in, not as bad as your case, but it was traumatizing for me nonetheless. Creating new saves ever since.

Thousands of hours on a single character, complete everything, collect everything, max out everything even if it means grinding for eternity or blocking the button and leaving your character to walk into a wall for a night. I'd die of boredom long before getting anywhere near that point. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this playstyle, it just boggles my mind how others can find it enjoyable. My completionist reserves get drained somewhere around completing the national Pokedex and that is far easier than doing every single thing in Skyrim.

Not a play style that would appeal to me in the slightest either but each to their own I guess, as long as the OP is enjoying them self it's all good.

Some back story. Was an escape for me when my father died a couple years ago. One of those weird "It soothes me" feeling when I play it. Anxiety and all is gone now, but the good feeling returns when I play it. It is what it is.........

How exactly making a new save file instead of overwriting an existing one is helping?

If things go south, you can go back some steps and maybe lose 10 hours instead of 1000+.

How in the world did HeyHeyNow get 1,800hrs on a single character on the ps3 without a massive amount of lag? How large is your save file? In my experience when the save file reaches 15-16 mb it is unplayable via lag, 200 hours or so on ps3.

I see. I'm sorry about your father. I may not fully understand, but I know what it's like when a game helps you cope with stuff in your life. In any case, I hope you enjoy your new playthrough. And good luck with keeping your save functional. Unfortunately, I don't play on console, so I don't know what could help.

fallout3 did the same for me in quite a similar situation.

just one of the many reasons why i love you, bethesda

I've never played on the PS3 but I still don't see how you can get so many hours on one save. I'd have had a borked game long before that! It's nice to hear how soothing it is for you though. Elder Scrolls games have been so good to me as well.

The saves are basically a database and not all of the database is updated on each save operation. By creating a new slot, you force the game to write the entire database again.

Playing a "tidy game" can help with this. As mentioned above, picking up dropped weapons and placing them on an NPC (not needed as much as it used to be) can help. But, so can things like closing a door if you opened it, not moving things around in a cell (although cells are reset periodically), not displaying things in the open, not storing an excessive amount of swag (although items in a container is much better than items on a shelf for game stability). Good thing is, 99% of the game does not encourage you to play an untidy game.

Another thing that can help is to see a quest through to completion before starting another one. Less variables that the game has to keep track of this way. You can accept quests, just don't start on them until you are ready to. Note, sometimes you do want to work on more than one quest at a time, like if the quest is sending you to some place another quest will, but just don't do this with a bunch of quests.

Sadly, Skyrim's impossibly vast open world seems to be a double edged sword in this regard.

I don't think Bethesda expects anyone to put that many hours into a character. Their games tend to suffer from bloat after a while, and bugs (like the infamous Oblivion A-Bomb) tend to show up in a few hundred hours of play, showing that they never test them to that kind of duration.

I never have a problem with overwriting saves, and I've been doing it in every TES game. I keep four active saves for each character, cycling among them, and I create four new ones every few levels. I've only had a couple of corrupted saves in thousands of hours of play, and because of my four-save system, I've never lost more than an hour of progress on a crash or other problem.

So you hate Beth because you broke your game?

Lesson learned, have at least 2 separate save files per character that you alternate between...I personally will save outside of a dungeon, then within the dungeon I will save again on a different save file, after completing and exiting save over the first file and so on; this way the saves aren't far apart in play time if something goes wrong. I'll do the same with saving before starting a quest, then use a separate save file throughout the quest to save at random points.

Also clutter is bad, you should never dump things anywhere in the world, even in your house...store unwanted items in dead bodies or respawning containers and keep the wanted items in chest and other containers in your home but don't fill 1 with thousands of items.

I mix it up, I'll overwrite a save a few times before deleting it and creating a new save...been doing this since release with no issues. Every new character I create is from the initial save that's made right before character creation in Helgen and that file is a couple years old now. I haven't rode on the cart in so long that I forget what's said there.

Oh okay I get it now. Personally I have no problem starting a new game from scratch, but I would not want to start over from scratch and try to copy the exact same set of quests over again that I did before. Not only would this take loads of time, but if i already know what happens....

Fortunately my memory is pretty bad. I actually have done some quests more than once, with the same level of immersemant, simply because I don't remember what happens as the quest rolls on.

This actually sounds like a problem with the PS3 itself, not the game. How old is your system? I had a 6-year old PS3 die this past summer, and I noticed it started doing some weird stuff like this before it finally YLOD'd. If your PS3's fan is going into high-speed even after a short amount of time, that's a sure sign things are going south.

This.

I have at least 5 or 6 saves for each character spread out over about 7 levels between each save. For example, if my highest level was 37 the save behind that one would have my character at level 30.

Sorry for double post, I'm on my phone. The same thing happened with my 360 before it finally bit the dust. I lost count of how many years I had it.