What is the best choice for the flora respawn bug?


I have been using flora respawn fix for a while and it seems to be working great as far as I can tell.


I now see a new fix called Wisemans303 Flora Fixs. It says this mod is intended as a replacement for the flora respawn fix. So basically is this mod a better choice and why exactly?

The main difference is the original flora respawn fix was not tied to the cell respawn timer and the new one is. The new one also fixes some additional and somewhat unrelated minor bugs (listed on the mod's Nexus page) and does not cause save game bloat or increased memory usage. The original flora respawn fix causes a very small amount of save game bloat and memory usage since the save remembers each time you pick a plant. But the amount is very small, so unless you play the character a very long time and pick a ton of plants all the time, you may not notice. The original also seems to require fewer compatibility patches.


I still use the original flora respawn fix. I prefer it since it lets flora respawn without needing the cell to reset. I hate the way Bethesda designed cells not to reset unless the player stays out of the cell for X days. It is annoying that the respawn timer resets every time the player enters the cell, because I find my characters avoiding cells or waiting in inns for ten days just so places will respawn, which is totally unimmersive. In the past (before flora respawn fix when I was playing in console), the main reason I would want a cell to respawn is so plants would grow back. Now I don't have to worry about that.


With the original respawn fix, cell reset is irrelevant to whether plants respawn. Instead, plants respawn on their own timer and it does not matter if the player is in the cell, the plants will respawn. I like this approach very much since plants will grow back even if I am there, which is immersive. Plants should not stop growing merely because the PC passed by at any time less than 10 days ago.


The author of the new respawn fix did not like this mechanic since it leads to the possibility that a plant might respawn while you are watching it if you happen to stare at it at the exact moment the timer runs out, and he also wanted to eliminate the minor bloat/memory issues and fix a few other minor bugs.


Either one is a viable option. If your like me and really value plants respawning even if the cell doesn't, then the original is probably the one to pick. Otherwise, the new one seems like a good choice.

IMO I don't think either one of them is really any better than the other. They both use scripts attached to TREE records via TES5Edit. Therefore they will both spawn script instances whenever those objects are encountered in the game. Their harvest states will all be remembered - as will those in the vanilla game too.

It literally comes down to which minor differences in implementation you prefer to have, if plant harvesting bothers you enough to want to address it.

Thanks. That's good to know. I should clarify that the information I posted about the save game bloat issues was solely from posts the author of the new flora mod made on his Nexus page. I have no independent knowledge of such things and would defer to your greater knowledge of these issues and glad to know that my choice to use the original mod won't bloat my game more than the new one.

Oh it does bother me, a lot.


So just for clarification they both bloat your saves over time?


Is the data returned after the plant regrow with both mods?

I wouldn't say either one of them bloats the save. It's entirely expected that script instances will spawn when encountering scripted objects in the game. Since neither of them causes these instances to grow exponentially while playing the game, it isn't fair to say that either of them are going to do anything terribly significant with regard to the size of your save.

This isn't like the problem with Skybirds where it continually spawns NEW instances on NEW objects. It's more or less just like how Nirnroot is handled. Your save will grow somewhat, but it won't be anything to worry about using either one of these.

The methods used to reset the harvested plants is the only relevant difference. So if you want them to do so with the other cell objects, use Wiseman's. If you want them to behave more like the Nirnroots, birds, and fish, then use the other one.

Oh I see thanks for the clarification. I may just continue with the old flora respawn fix since I am familiar with it.


I was kind of freaked our when I read Wisemans flora fix and it mentioned that the flora respawn fix would bloat your save.

The flora respawn script uses

RegisterForSingleUpdateGameTime(Game.GetGameSettingInt("iHoursToRespawnCell"))

in an OnActivate event. Doesn't that hook the mod to the cell respawn timer?

You are taking my statement out of context. What I was saying was that re-entering the cell would not reset flora respawn fixes timer since it is a seperate scripted timer. So respawning flora occurs independently of when the cell resets.

Arthmoor, would there be anyway someone would be able to re-write the scripting in Skybirds to eliminate the bloating issue or would the entire implementation need to scrapped and redone from scratch? It's a shame none of these bird mods that cause issues has been redone by anyone once they were discovered and figured out what the issues were...

As I understand it, Skybirds would be easy to fix by simply setting up bird spawners in the world. Supposedly the reason it wasn't was to avoid compatibility issues. That's trivially easy to do though. Just load it early in the load order so stuff that needs to change cell records can do so.

Now though, it would probably just be too tedious to go back and do it that way. Which is likely why nobody has (assuming the author gave permission).