I'm getting a consistent crash a few cell's east of Agatha's house, and I've narrowed it down to the interaction between Mart's Mutant Mod and Powered Power Armor.

1) As far as I know, I'm using the latest version of both mods. PPA version 1.4 gold hotfix and the MMM 6.2 update posted in the MMM thread.

2) The problem appears to be a group of Outcasts fighting a group of raiders around 2-3 cells east of Agatha's house (so, Block 0,0, Sub-block 0,1, (3, 8) or (4,8), I think). With just PPA, there's no problem. With just MMM, there's no problem and there are more of each (6-7 Outcasts and raiders instead of the 3 without MMM). With both, it crashes every time.

I haven't run into this problem with any other group of power-armored enemies, including the outcast Outcasts (so to speak) in the raider faction or the Enclave. I also haven't run into it with other groups of Outcasts, though this is the first time I can remember I've seen an Outcast group so large (there are 6-7 of them and a robot with MMM installed) other than the group I had to fight for the Anchorage DLC, which gave me no problems. PPA does add tokens to powered-armored characters' inventories to distribute the PPA upgrades, and it's possible that this is causing a conflict. What I can't figure out is why it's localized to this specific group of Outcasts.

Turned off PPA and run over to the cell to check, and it's 10 Outcasts against 4 raiders. :flamethrower:

Trying to run over after deactivating MMM still causes the crash (makes sense, since I didn't reset the spawns). I just ran over with PPA off and saved in the middle. Going to try turning PPA back on while I'm in the cell and see if that helps.

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Okay, that worked, and I think I found the source of the problem.

When I reactivated and loaded back in, around half the Outcasts were disappearing and reappearing multiple times per second, presumably as PPA reshuffled their inventories to account for any power armor mods they might be carrying. This lasted about 30 seconds, and scale that up to 5 people and I can see how the flood of operations would crash the game.

What I have no idea of is why it only affected half the Outcasts, and why it didn't happen when I ran into an Enclave camp.

Open console and click on the outcastes and see if they are all vanilla or if the ones that are flashing are maybe mod added.

Then you may find a third mod in play with this.

Some of them are from Fallout 3, and some of them are locally referenced (ff prefix)--I assume they're from MMM. The flickering seemed to be random, though. Some 00-prefix Outcasts were affected, and not others. Same with the ff-prefix ones.

Star Paladin Cross was also flickering in and out for some reason. That's the first time I've seen that. :ermm:

I have a better location where it happened now that I was able to get close--it's directly south of the Scrapyard gate.

When you see ff prefix then type in GetBaseObject - that will give you the formID with the first two telling you what load order the mod is.

But then perhaps it is more related to what power armor.

I'd also contact ImpPerverse - he was ore than helpful before when I had issues with another mod.

Huh. Trying GetBaseObject got me a prefix of...ff.

I had another crash that I think was related to the Power Armor Deconstruction feature of PPA, though (crashed on killing someone in power armor, turned off deconstruction, was able to kill them fine), so there's something else. I'll definitely contact Imp of the Perverse.

Try turning off power armor scaling in PPA. It has been known to cause issues of various kinds in the past. In my game it always causes a huge amount of enclave to appear at the purifier the first time you get there, and seem to be in endless supply. I talked to Imp of the Perverse and we figured out power armor scaling was the issue, and I have heard of others having issues caused by it as well. Also, come to think of it I used to encounter flickering outcasts, but after I removed power armor scaling it never happened.

The only issue here is that if the issue is caused by power armor scaling you will need to revert to a save from before the first time you used the mod that is not near any power armor wearers, or start a new game, and then turn off power armor scaling immediately.

I lost about 5 characters to it myself.

I've had scaling off pretty much the whole time I've been playing.

I just got to the part where the Enclave showed up, and I've been encountering CTDs when Enclave troops die. At least a few are related to deconstruction (which I've also turned off), but they sometimes persist, so I may have to turn off power armor explosions as well and see if that helps.

Just to add some info here - i've had CTD when Enclave die and I don't have MMM or PPA installed.
For me, the CTD was being caused by my mod adding armor tokens to dead guys during a ref-walk to track them. I have since changed to using an actor value to track dead guys and the CTD's went away. Possibly adding the token in the same frame that they die, but I didn't really pursue it when I figured out what caused it, and just dumped the token idea.

If I understand it right, PPA does the same thing to handle distribution of power armor upgrades and breakdown of armor, if those settings are enabled. That may be why it's crashing when Enclave members die. I can't figure out why it doesn't seem to crash when Fallen Brothers (from MMM) or Brotherhood of Steel members die even though they're wearing power armor too.

Just fyi PPA does not generate the power armor addons on death. I have been hit by infrared pulse blasts by an enemy in power armor who had a pulse generator and infrared pulse modulator.

This is just a stab in the dark, but have you ever thought of using FO3Edit to make a merged patch, or wyre flash to make a bashed patch? I wonder if that would help.

It does remove them as armor pieces and readd them as misc items, though. I've had the occasional (very occasionally, maybe once or twice in ~90 hours) crash when removing my character's power armor from those scripts, so it's possible the scripts that do it for others could sometimes be causing crashes.



I've had a Bashed Patch since I started playing this character.