Windows XP, and I did a test run by making a small change to a different mod, and it saved just fine. This mod, if I try to save any changes, it crashes. I tried hitting 'debug' when the "this program has encountered an error and needs to close" box popped up. I tried restarting my computer. Nada.

Yes, I'll admit, it's a fairly big, sprawling mod with a ridiculous amount of stuff added to this one little corner of the game. I've been working on it for ages, mostly just as a hobby to add my own personal castle-town-thing. I mean, I'm not in any hurry to get it finished up and published or anything, but I've put over a year and a half's worth of work into it. My favorite rooms in the castle were nearing completion and I was starting to get around to making sure everybody was in the right factions, had equipment best suited for their classes, carried the keys they would need, I was laying down the pathgrids and putting little personal touches in the NPCs' living quarters, that kinda thing. Playtesting has been minimal, but most of the stuff I really cared about worked just fine. I'm still learning my way around scripts and AI packages, but as long as everybody wanders in the general vicinity of where they're supposed to and sells what I tell them to and the guard dogs don't attack the guards, I'm happy.

What worries me is that this is actually version two of this castle. The first one... had the same thing happen to it, actually, now that I think about it, though I've greatly refined my techniques since then. I still miss the old one, but at the same time I was so happy with how the new one was coming along. That made me think that my mod was just getting too big, but then I realized it's still less than five megs, and the Elsweyr mod is almost thirty! True, I guess I can rebuild with a version 3, but... please tell me there's some sort of way I can determine if this is fixable? Can it be fixed? Or is it just one of those "either it works or it doesn't" situations?

It will be difficult if you do not play test it very often...

That said, think of the last things to did to the mod when it 'stopped' working. Was it landscaping, adding new items, what? The probablility that something is causing the crash that you did is high. If you can narrow that down, it might be saveable by removing the items or changes temporarily.

Or you could go back to a previous version if you have backups saved.

Another thing you could do it package it up and let us take a look at it.

The plugin itself is less than five megs, but I know that the meshes and the textures folders I'm working with total over four gigs, and that's not counting all the clothing and armor plugins that I loaded and then created copies of in my mod, without saving the textures to my own folder and then duplicating the model and saving it. What can I say, I like a variety in my architecture?

The last thing I did when it went to hell... hm. I was working on my mages' guild basemant, which is a retextured Bruma basemant with a warp pad going down to a sub-basemant in a subspace. The sub-basemant is huge because it's an alchemy room, and I had a few scripted items in there. I decided that it was too huge for one cell and I should move the alchemy room to another cell, so instead of cut-pasting the minimally furnished basemant to another cell and just changing the cell names around, I cut-pasted the alchemy room and its 600+ references because at the time it made more sense. I did disconnect the warp pads first, but then the CS started freaking out about scripted activators and containers that weren't going to work anymore (and I think maybe the vendor chest, too). I got it pasted in the new cell, but when I tried to save it, that's when the crashing started. And it didn't save the move (but the next time it loaded up, it had saved the fact that I'd corrected an object with the wrong filepath, making it show the model load thingy).

Now I can't even create a new rug and save it. So... how would I go about fixing that?

I haven't done much playtesting because I keep thinking "Okay, I know I need to go in there and see if This Thing works, but while I'm in there, I've been meaning to put lights in that cell, I need to change this around and do that and add that and delete that and..." (FOUR HOURS LATER) "Oh, crap, it's bedtime!"

My mod "somehow" just disappeared yesterday :/

It wasnt even near as big as yours and I only just started working on it but damn, I already had one of the bossrooms done, and it was getting so damn epic D:

Search your harddrive for the file. Vista, and Win7 can sometimes do odd things with your files, especially if your game is installed to the program files folder.

Did that already, the file is simply gone. :/

did you make sure the search looking for hidden files/folders as well?

Yep. But to hell with that. As it stands in my topic, I started anew, with better planning.

That works pretty well too...... Good Luck.

I tried deleting all the scripted activators (and the couple of static objects they pertained to), the vendor chest, the NPC, and the nirnroots out of a couple of containers. It still crashed when I tried to save it. Maybe I should delete the entire alchemy room? Think that would work? It took me a few hours to make it, but I can do it again if it means saving all the NPCs and the castle I built and the unique weapons/armor I felt clever about and especially the books. Because if I spent hours on the alchemy room, then I've spent days, possibly even weeks on the library. It's huge, and I made liberal use of bookplanes and booksets, but there are also a few shelves where I hand-placed the books. There's, like, 800-something objects in the Library cell. And I went on the Imperial Library and copy-pasted some rare texts, too, to give a new impression of restricted and hard-to-find literature since I've read all the Oblivion and Morrowind and Daggerfall books already.

Its never a good idea to try and copy/paste tons of objects from one place to another, especially if there are links and stuff attached to them.

I would make a copy of your mod, then in the copy, delete the one cell and see if that works.

I will try that. Cross your fingers!

Still crashed. Any other ideas?

I would be at least slightly happy if I could make a little 'lifeboat' mod, and have my castle mod loaded but not the active file so I could make copies of the stuff I really, really wanted to save (like the library, or maybe a few hand-placed bookshelves, or at the very least the book files).

I bet if you upload it to 4-shared or the like, someone would be happy to take a look at it for you. Possibly it won't crash another person's CS, and they will be able to re-save it, which might fix whatever is causing you grief.