Reading Citadel Crash Logs and Load Failures

Because Citadel sits underneath other mods, it appears constantly in crash reports — often as an innocent bystander. Learning to read those logs saves you from removing the wrong mod.

Finding the real culprit

A stack trace reads top-down from the failure point. If the topmost lines mention Citadel, look one or two frames further down for the mod that called into it. That mod name is your actual problem. Citadel appearing in the trace means the dependent mod used a Citadel API incorrectly, or the two are version-mismatched.

Common failure patterns

• Missing dependency: the log states a mod requires Citadel and it was not found. Install Citadel.
• Version mismatch: the dependent mod expects a newer or older Citadel API. Update both together.
• Asset load failure: a model or animation file from the dependent mod failed to parse. Citadel reports it, but the bad file belongs to the other mod.
• Registry conflict: two mods registered the same thing through Citadel's framework.

Step-by-step triage

1. Open the crash report and scroll to the first line mentioning Citadel.

2. Read the frames immediately below it for the calling mod.

3. Note the exact error message — "missing," "mismatch," and "parse" point to different fixes.

4. Update Citadel and the dependent mod to matching versions and retest.

5. If it still fails, isolate to just those two mods before reporting.