Hi--

I'm suffering from a problem relating to save file size. In short, the current status is that the save file grows from a relatively sane and stable ~10 MiB (at some 70 hours played) to 21 MiB and growing within the span of about 3 real-world hours (game time advanced around 4 days during that). This causes noticeable problems with scripts and script events getting laggy, eventually unplayably so. I do have a fair number of mods installed, including a few that add NPCs (Wars in Skyrim, Warzones, etc.) and it's in fact probable that one of them is causing the problem. Game is at the latest version (since Steam can't keep the setting to not update automatically).

The best I can tell from munging the .ess, comparing a presumed-good save to the most recent, bloated one is that the entire size difference is in the Papyrus section. In it, so far as I can tell, the readable strings (the CW03Script::AxeBalgruufs_var::… kind) are the same in both, so the bad/extra data is in the binary section. I haven't had the energy to try to find the pack format to actually parse that to see whether it's good but extra/unexpected data, or just altogether junk.

I'm happy to provide the file if anyone with access to actually view the contents wants to see it (or any number of them) or any other info, or just point me to some real tools for this.

There've been sporadic reports about this, and various more or less dubious ‘solutions’, so I'll start with removing the mods I added (hopefully not the ones I updated) just before the problem manifested, ensuring my timescale is defaulted, and doing the 7-day player home reset (actually probably 16 days to ensure all external cells reset?) in the meanwhile…