Game Skyrim Forum

ATTN: All modders (mod makers, not mod users)

Using SetStage causes save bloat, potentially leading to large saves and massive loading times.

The TTW Team and I have been struggling with this issue, we had narrowed it down to something to do with quest stages, but I spent the day piecing together the save file format and found that every time SetStage is called an entry is made in your save file of 8bytes. Two different TTW quest scripts were using SetStage in a gamemode block. One was running every frame, the other, every 5 seconds. Over the course of an hour of gameplay, that created save bloat of approx. 1.5 megabytes.

Now, it is not common modding practice to use Quest stages this gratuitously, so there is no need to abandon all mods that use Quest Stages, but the modding community as a whole should avoid using quest stages and should instead use NVSE user defined functions as much as humanly possible. If you refuse to use NVSE, make absolutely certain that you NEED a quest stage and make absolutely certain that it is called ONLY when it is NECESSARY.

This has been a public service announcement from the TTW Team.

+1

Thanks for taking the time to verify the theories that were put forth about this problem. It is possible that they could affect frame rate too because of the single threaded script engine, more research needed.

Upon cleaning the majority of the bloat out of save, I have seen no better framerates.