Behavior Node Slimmer (Patreon)

Behavior Node Slimmer

Now Available: W.I.P.

Your scenes weren’t broken. They were buried under ten thousand copies of themselves.

You know the crash. You install one more animation pack, run Pandora, start a scene, and the game is gone. The crash log points at hkbStateMachine, some ..Root, 0Master.hkb. You raise the animation limit, nothing changes. You untick a few packs and it “fixes” itself, until the next rebuild.

The cause isn’t the animations. Behavior engines write a brand new object for every link in 0_Master.hkx, even when thousands of them are exactly the same. On a big setup the character behavior graph fills with copies until it hits its node limit, and scenes start dying.

Behavior Node Slimmer folds those copies back into one. It does it in memory every time the game loads the file, so there’s nothing to run and nothing to redo after Pandora.

🔧 What’s included:

• In-memory slimming - the game loads a lean 0_Master.hkx, while the file on your disk is never touched

• Survives every rebuild - run Pandora as often as you like, and the next game start slims the new file on its own

• Zero animations removed - every animation, state and state machine stays exactly where it was

• Safety gates - only exact copies are folded. Anything used from elsewhere is left alone. If the result would lose a single animation, it refuses and the game reads the file unchanged

• Built-in checker - at the main menu it counts the nodes of your whole character graph and warns you if you’re still close to the limit

• Extra mode for huge setups - one switch in the INI saves about one more node per animation

📊 On the Master’s own game:

• 0_Master.hkx: 40,587 → 29,267 nodes (extra mode: 15,584)

• Whole character graph: 74,849 → 63,529 (extra mode: 49,846)

• Vanilla OStim scenes that crashed on start now play

This isn’t another “raise the limit” patch. It takes the weight off the graph instead of making the box bigger.

📋 Requirements

• Skyrim SE 1.5.97 or AE 1.6.x (up to 1.6.1170)

• SKSE

• Address Library for SKSE Plugins

• Behaviors built with Pandora or Nemesis

📥 Installation

1. Install with Vortex or MO2. No plugin, so load order doesn’t matter.

2. Play. You don’t need to run Pandora again because of this mod.

3. If the main menu warns you, open Data\SKSE\Plugins\BehaviorNodeSlimmer.ini and set bCollapsePackWrappers=1.

🧪 W.I.P. - please tell me:

• Does it work on MO2? (Tested on Vortex)

• Does it work on SE 1.5.97? (Tested on AE 1.6.1170)

• With bCollapsePackWrappers=1: any actor sliding or misaligned, or a pack switching positions oddly?

• If you crash, send Documents\My Games\Skyrim Special Edition\SKSE\BehaviorNodeSlimmer.log together with your crash log

💛 Thank you for every report that pointed at this crash. You’re the reason it has a fix now. And thank you for keeping the forge lit.

The Master found ten thousand copies of the same knot and cut them, one by one. The rope still holds.

Nothing was lost. Only the weight.

— Lirael 🐺🕯️

18+. Lighter now. Which means you can carry more.