The -DontCache argument for the Quick Auto Cleaner

[PegasusKoga]

After having had a smooth ride for the past month with Skyrim i had a nasty surprise today when i found out that huge parts of Apocrypha had simply vanished, preventing me from reaching Miraak and punching that pretender in the face.

Turns out it's a known bug if you clean the dlc without adding the -DontCache argument to the utility beforehand.  If reports are to be believed it also meant that the Soul Cairn area from the Dawnguard dlc was affected by the same glitch.

Fixed it by putting back the dirty masters and cleaning them again with the argument added this time.

However since i'm not familiar with the intricacies of the Quick Auto Cleaner i would like confirmation that i did not mess things up further by using the tool with that argument on the dlc's other than Dragonborn and Dawnguard (that would be Update.esm and Hearthfire.esm).

Thanks in advance.

[Arthmoor]

There are a few options here:

1. Continue to do what you're doing, using the -DontCache switch. This will make xEdit painfully slow every time you load it for this purpose, but works.

2. Head over to the xEdit Discord server and grab the latest WIP build (currently 4.0.3f) where the issues you describe have had workarounds added.

3. Just use the dirty files. This has the advantage of not needing to reclean when there are updates. Plus any new and weird bugs of this type are no longer an issue. It's the choice I've made and the game doesn't seem to care that the official files haven't been cleaned. Plus, if you're writing mods and uploading them for console users, they CANT clean their files at all so it's better to make mods this way too as long as you make sure to use ALL of the master files as masters to your mods.

Regardless of how you approach the official content, you should continue to clean things made by mod authors (unless they did it already, like I do). xEdit doesn't seem to have any of these oddities when dealing with user generated content.

[PegasusKoga]

1 hour ago, Arthmoor said:

There are a few options here:

1. Continue to do what you're doing, using the -DontCache switch. This will make xEdit painfully slow every time you load it for this purpose, but works.

2. Head over to the xEdit Discord server and grab the latest WIP build (currently 4.0.3f) where the issues you describe have had workarounds added.

3. Just use the dirty files. This has the advantage of not needing to reclean when there are updates. Plus any new and weird bugs of this type are no longer an issue. It's the choice I've made and the game doesn't seem to care that the official files haven't been cleaned. Plus, if you're writing mods and uploading them for console users, they CANT clean their files at all so it's better to make mods this way too as long as you make sure to use ALL of the master files as masters to your mods.

Regardless of how you approach the official content, you should continue to clean things made by mod authors (unless they did it already, like I do). xEdit doesn't seem to have any of these oddities when dealing with user generated content.

Thanks for replying, Arthmoor.

You know, i've been hearing left and right (mostly on Reddit) that cleaning the masters was no longer an essential step and i've been trying to make up my mind ever since.

But if an authority of Bethesda modding such as yourself seems to think it does not make a difference either way then i will refrain form cleaning the official masters if i ever have to reinstall Skyrim SE again (i will still use SSEEdit to clean my other mods, that goes without saying).

For now i will just pick your first option for my current installation because "it just works".