Flora Respawn Fix
Fixes broken respawning for flora (and fauna).
ATTENTION: While I reserve the right to delete off-topic comments and trolling from my threads, I WILL NEVER BAN ANY USER FROM ACCESSING ANY OF MY FILES, NO MATTER WHAT THEY POST IN THE COMMENT THREAD. THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS TO THIS RULE.
FLORA RESPAWN FIX
“Engine bugs? What’re those?”
What it does:
You’ve hit this bug, even if you don’t know it. Every time you went to a place after the cell was supposed to reset, and wondered “hey why haven’t those plants respawned yet?” it’s this bug. When you go to Solitude and you see those Nightshade there and then you go grab a cup of coffee and come back and restart the game and they’re gone, it’s this bug. FloraRespawnFix.esp fixes this bug.
See, since the 1.3 patch there has been a bug in the Skyrim engine that it can’t ‘remember’ that plants, mushrooms, nests, and some salmon have respawned, after you reload a save. So you might go to a place again, see that everything is as it should be (i.e. has respawned), then if you save and reload… poof! it’s gone. You have to wait for the cell to reset again. You might not notice it unless you look for it, but I’ve seen it explained as “oh plants take 30 days to respawn” (they don’t, they would normally respawn when the cell they’re in resets – like anything else), or that certain plants just don’t respawn (they all should), or whatever. Nope, bug. Most players have just gotten used to it.
Well, they don’t have to get used to it anymore. This mod can’t directly fix Skyrim.exe, but it can alter how these flora and fauna are processed by the executable, such that they are no longer affected by the bug.
Flora Respawn Fix thread on the Bethesda forum site
Many thanks to zilav for doing the work on TES5Edit, and DayDreamer (wasite?) for suggesting it to him in the first place (and doing heaps of testing, and letting me know about it). More of their effort and time went into 2.0 than my own. Thank you.
Installation:
Place the contents of the archive in your Skyrim/Data directory. Works with Nexus Mod Manager.
Don’t clean this mod. It isn’t needed, and TES5Edit will break it if you do.
Don’t use 1.x, as there are apparently some bugs which were causing crashes for some users. I’m not supporting 1.x anymore so those bugs won’t get fixed – if you’re still using 1.x you should upgrade.
Compatibility:
Most things will be compatible unless they edit base FLOR and TREE records. In particular, mods that place new instances of vanilla flora, or move existing ones around, are compatible.
FAQ:
Q: Will this mod fix stuff I’ve already harvested?
A: People keep asking this question in the comment thread, and I thought I had explained how this work pretty well, but apparently not. I’ll try again:
The rule is: stuff you’ve never harvested before, is automatically fixed. There is no need to worry about it at all. It just works. However, stuff you’ve harvested before is not fixed until you install this mod and harvest it again.
So for example, if there are 50 plants in an area, but you only ever harvested one of them, then the 49 of them will be fixed as soon as you install the plugin and you don’t have to worry about them at all. It is only that one, which you will have to harvest once before it is fixed. That’s why, when you visit an area after installing this mod, if there are any flora you want to fix, you should harvest them right away if they have respawned.
If you think about this, the reason why is obvious: FloraRespawnFix has not been able to fix it yet! Since it isn’t fixed, if you don’t harvest it right away, and instead save the game and reload, it will disappear! Remember, it’s still broken until you harvest it! So, you would have to wait for it to respawn again.
You can leave stuff broken though, if you don’t want to go through the hassle. Just ignore the stuff you’ve already harvested, and let those ones stay broken. There is no harm in doing that.
IMO, most people will do fine just installing this mod and then forgetting about it. Just leave the stuff that is broken, broken, and know that everything else is fixed. And if there are some flora in some conspicuous spots that you want to fix, you have the option to do that too (but again, I can’t stress enough, it is an option).
An option.
I hope that clears it up 🙂
Q: Will this mod wreck my save, increase file size to absurd levels, hurt performance, and otherwise ruin my day?
A: Probably not, although some caution is required. Once you start using this mod, it is unwise to uninstall and continue on after that. At a minimum, all the plants you have harvested will vanish from the game, never to return. Mushrooms, nests, and some salmon may also display odd behavior. This mod alters in a very fundamental way every plant object in the game. As such, you should play around with this mod a bit, make sure it’s right for you, then commit to using it for the rest of that game (I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t). If not, revert to a save from before you started using this.
If you run various tools on your save you’re going to see this mod attaches scripts to a lot of objects. But, as these tools will even tell you, that’s only a problem if many of those scripts are running at once, which with this mod definitely isn’t the case at all. This mod executes a couple lines of code when you harvest a plant, then nothing happens until it respawns, when it executes a couple more lines of code. Really most of the time (as in, 99.99% of the time or greater, literally) none of the scripts in this mod are running.
Q: Okay great but what about performance?
A: Oh, right. My testing has shown no performance impact in using this mod, that I can tell (I have a good computer, but it is not the latest and greatest by any stretch). Your save size will increase by approximately 5KB for each flora or fauna you harvest until that object respawns at which point the game will reclaim the space. This could become noticable if you harvest a lot of things in a short period of time.
History:
2.1.3 – A few more edits for USKP.
2.1.2 – Smoothed out a few conflicts with recent versions of USKP.
2.1.1 – Corrected an issue where sometimes references in the world would not be cleaned up completely until the player harvested them again.
2.1 – Merged all plugins into a single ESP. NOT BACKWARD COMPATIBLE with previous versions. Only use on a new save or a save that has never seen ANY previous version of Flora Respawn Fix before.
2.0 – Updated to use an alternate method to force the respawn. Brings back the animation on some flora (flowers, etc.). No worldspace or cell edits, so much better compatibility with other mods. BACKWARD COMPATIBLE with 1.x – nothing is required to upgrade, just drop it in. Things you already harvested with 1.x will need to be harvested again before the animation comes back.
1.x – Various updates here to incorporate USKP placement and other fixes.
1.0 – Initial release.
