Welcome to the Troubleshooting section of our Vortex Mod Manager guide. Here, we aim to provide comprehensive solutions to common issues encountered while using Vortex, the premier mod management tool designed to enhance your gaming experience. Whether you’re facing installation hiccups, mod conflicts, deployment errors, or any other challenge, our goal is to help you resolve them swiftly and efficiently. Drawing from a wealth of community insights and expert advice, this section is your go-to resource for troubleshooting advice, ensuring that your modding journey is as smooth and enjoyable as possible. Let’s dive into solving your Vortex Mod Manager dilemmas together, keeping your game modded and ready for action.
Why can I not change the plugin load order directly (drag & drop)?
With Vortex, unlike other mod managers, you do not need to manually change the load order – Vortex sorts plugins automatically based on LOOT.
You can, however, control in what order individual or groups of plugins are loaded by either setting a dependency (i.e. declaring that one plugin needs to load after another) or by making use of groups to accomplish the same thing for several plugins at once.
I’ve set up a tool but it’s not working. What can I do?
If the tool is not an .exe file, it cannot usually be run directly, but instead needs to be run through an “interpreter”, such as Java for .jar files, Python for .py files, and cmd for .cmd or .bat files.
Vortex tries to support as many of these automatically as possible, but it can only support interpreters that are correctly installed and detectable by Vortex.
If Vortex does not automatically support your interpreter, you will have to put the path of the interpreter into the “Target” field and the name of your tool into the command line. In some cases further parameters might be required.
For example with Java the “Target” field should be something like…
c:\program files\java\bin\java.exe…whereas the “Command Line” should read:
-jar c:\path\to\your\java\based\tool\tool.jarWhat can I do if Vortex fails to update/install?
The Vortex installer will be unable to write to the installation folder if some of the files contained therein are still in use by another process, such as for example antivirus programs, resulting in a failed installation.
Ensure that no security software is hampering the process (e.g., Windows Defender, BitDefender, Malwarebytes, etc.). Often, restarting your computer and/or updating or ensuring that Vortex related services and directories are ‘whitelisted’ can resolve these issues. Refer to the associated software’s website for more information.
I have installed a mod but the corresponding esm/esp doesn’t show up. What can I do?
Many mods, such as texture replacers, do not come with a plugin file (esp/esm).
If you are certain that the mod you installed includes a plugin file and it still does not show up after installation, it might be related to deployment. The Plugins screen in Vortex only shows deployed files. If you have disabled automatic deployment and not deployed manually after installing the mod, the plugin won’t show up in the list and the mod will not affect your game.
To rectify this, navigate to your Mods screen and make sure your mods are deployed correctly.
Vortex does not list DLCs in the plugins.txt file. Is this a bug?
This is intentional and should not pose a problem. The games will load certain esms automatically and in a hard-coded order so whether or not they are listed in the plugins.txt, and in what order, is irrelevant. Vortex does not list them in the plugin.txt as to not raise the false expectation that you are able to manually reorder the DLCs.
For that same reason DLCs have no “Enable/Disable” toggle in the Vortex UI.
Should I delete “x” files/folders from my Vortex installation?
No. All files and folders managed by Vortex have a specific purpose and removing them may cause unexpected side effects up to and including the application crashing.
I am getting a “Application state is invalid” message after updating. Is something wrong?
As Vortex is maintained and updated by the development team, more and more sanity checks are added to ensure orphaned parts of the application state are cleaned up properly. This is not an error and choosing the “Repair” option will take care of orphaned parts ensuring that your Vortex installation is kept up to date.
I am getting an error about disc space (error: ENOSPC: no space left on device). What is wrong?
Vortex will inform you when you are running out of disk space and won’t be able to perform tasks such as installing or deploying mods if not enough space is available. To address the issue, free up some space on your hard drive to enable Vortex to perform its tasks.
Vortex crashes with a white screen. What should I do?
Some users are reporting occasional crashes that manifest themselves as white screens inside Vortex. Often, users are in addition presented with an error message when Vortex is restarted. There are several, potential reasons for this occurring and the following outlines a couple of these scenarios with possible solutions and/or workarounds.
Vortex crashes when trying to install certain (not all) mods with a c# scripted installer
Cause: Vortex currently (up to 0.16.12) does not deal well with unhandled exceptions from the installer script. While Vortex should not crash in this case and instead report a proper error message, even if Vortex did handle the error correctly it is rather likely that the mod installation would still fail.
Solution/Workaround: Please send in a link to any mod that triggers this and as a workaround, see if there is a manual install option.
Vortex crashes when trying to open the settings page
Cause: This is possibly caused by running Vortex on Windows 7 without the “Platform update” (which is not included in service packs!) What happens is that the “Theme” settings page tries to acquire a list of installed fonts from Windows and due to an incompatibility between the outdated Windows 7 and the library we use to retrieve the fonts, Vortex crashes.
Solution/Workaround: The best solution is to install the platform update. Option 2 is to go to the extensions page and disable the “theme-switcher” extension.
Vortex crashes trying to install any mod
Cause: In this case, Vortex should present you with an exception code of 0xe0434f4d. This code indicates a broken .Net install.
Solution/Workaround: Try to update the .Net framework. If that fails, try to uninstall and reinstall .Net entirely. If you find something that works for you, please let us know via the feedback system or our support forums.
Vortex crashes when the game crashes
Cause: All cases of this occurring that we are aware of feature an exception code of 0xe0000008. This indicates the system is out of memory or has other memory related issues.
Solution/Workaround: If you are able to reproduce this issue, please check your task manager and see how much memory Vortex actually uses around the time of the crash. Vortex itself shouldn’t be allocating additional memory while it’s sitting in the background. If you find Vortex using more memory than it should, please report your findings via our feedback system or our support forums.
Next, please verify that you have Virtual Memory enabled in Windows (System->Advanced system settings ->Advanced->Performance Options->Advanced and that you either have the size managed by the system and there is enough free disk space for two times your RAM, or, if you have a custom size set, make sure that the max value is at least 2x your RAM. So if you have 16GB of RAM, you need room for at least 32GB of Virtual Memory.
If this is the case and you still see these crashes, you may want to look into freeing up memory while the game is running: Close all unnecessary applications (including Vortex) while the game is running. If the game is still crashing, disable the more memory heavy mods.
There is another possible cause: A hardware defect in your RAM modules or an incompatibility between memory modules and mainboard or too much overclocking. These kinds of problems can be extremely hard to figure out because they may occur inconsistently when your system is under load and actually accesses the broken bits in the module. The only way to know for sure if your RAM is ok and can deal with the clock is to run a proper RAM check.
How do you know if the RAM check is “proper”? If it is able to run under DOS and takes at least a couple of hours. There is no way to test the entire RAM from a Windows application and there is no way to do a stress test in a few seconds, any windows application that claims to test your RAM and is done in 5 minutes is unreliable.
My game is crashing after migrating to Vortex
This is not caused by Vortex. It is most often revealing problems with your setup that Nexus Mod Manager had hidden away or you have defined file conflicts differently to how the files were set up in NMM.
It is also possible that when removing Nexus Mod Manager, important files such as ENB/Reshade/Script Extenders were corrupted and require reinstallation (either with Vortex or manually).
Each setup is different and very hard to troubleshoot. We recommend finishing any game you are currently playing with your old mod manager and starting fresh with Vortex for your next game.
Why is Vortex blurry?
Vortex (and other Electron apps) may appear blurry, this is caused by the FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing) feature which is part of the Nvidia graphics software.
You can turn off FXAA in the Nvidia Control Panel under 3D Settings.