Hello there, I don't know where else to turn so here I go.
So I've just gotten to "Taming the Waves" in the main quest and have to go to Old Rashêngrad now. After taking the myrad to the Northern Heartland watch tower, I made my way down the road west from the tower. Whenever I move any further, I get immediate CTD, and it happens every single time on repeated attempts. I figured I'd do some other quests and exploration before coming back to the main quest. Coming now to the present, I'm directly west of Ark's main gate down the road and I come to this bridge with a small ruined wooden hut on the other side of it. Same issue as before, whenever I walk toward the hutt, right after crossing the bridge I get a CTD, and this happens on every subsequent repeat attempt. So I find myself unable to walk into the Heartland Cell of the map, thus blocking my progress.
I have tried a variety of crash fixes such as enabling UseOSAllocators, disabling/enabling OneTweak, putting settings to low, disabling touch keyboard and even verifying my file cache several times. This is a lightly modded playthrough with 18 activated .esp files, however aside from "Better Ark" and "Akropolis (EN)" mods on Steam Workshop, I don't have anything else installed otherwise that affects world space or cells, not even the armor mods I have installed add chests to the world and are solely crafted or acquired through console. Admittedly, I am not using Mod Organizer or Nexus Mod Manager and have only been using manual installs, but I figured that since I was going lightly modded with less than 20 plugins that I'd be mostly safe in that regard when it comes to mod size.