Title was too long and got cut off. But this is a work around for loading saves when you have more than 3 missing plugins which normally causes the game to crash.

I posted this over at nexus but thought people here might find it useful in case they didn't see it there.

The issue:
I found that with a set of older saves, since the mods they used are missing (more than 3 plugins) if I tried to load them they'd just crash the game. This seems to be a bug in the game where when it tries to load a save and is missing plugins it shows a list of the missing plugins. In my testing if it had 3 or less it shows the names and asks if you wish to load anyway. If it has more than 3 it causes a crash. The trick of loading the save in the F4SGE and removing the references works fine (usually), but it can be a pain to figure out which ones were removed if you hadn't kept track. It wasn't working quite right for me, it was dumping some armor pieces even though I still had the plugin for that armor installed (same version as when the save was created). So I found a sort of work around to have a type of behaviour similar to before the patch that added in the missing plugin list.

How to fix:
You'll need to find the name of the save you're trying to load. For my example I'll use "Save230_8DCE7E74_4173756E61_Commonwealth_081203_20160113065710_58_2", note I do not have the file extension ".fos". For this trick it should not be on it. You can make a copy of the save file and rename it if it makes you more comfortable and easier to type. Note, you may be able to copy and paste the name into the console in game.

Once you load the game up hit your console command key [`] backtick is the default, and use the load command followed by your save game.

Code:

load Save230_8DCE7E74_4173756E61_Commonwealth_081203_20160113065710_58_2

This skips the dialogue to notify you of missing plugins which is what seems to be causing the crash. Using Quick Reload for a previous Quick Save which may have missing plugins also works. If you were to manually try to load it via the game menu it would try to notify you of missing plugins and could cause the aforementioned crash.

Hope it helps.