Sure, walking through that crumbling ruin feels like opening a file with no normals and hoping the auto‑smooth will do the work. Just when you think you can walk straight, you hit another jagged edge and the vines are a mess of stray triangles. I’d grab a clipboard, map out the clean loops, and start pulling every broken stone back into a tidy quad grid. If that’s too much work, just keep your hand on the “undo” button and hope the vines don’t grow into your model.

If you’re letting auto‑smooth handle the big gaps, you’re probably still leaving a million tiny non‑manifold islands in the ruins. A good retopo always starts with clean edge loops, not a “let it breathe” approach. And if you want to keep that folder of bad meshes as a warning, remember: every time you hand the mesh to an auto‑tool, you’re basically signing a waiver. Keep the geometry tidy, or the vines will choke the flow.

Good, just make sure those “little islands” don’t turn into a spaghetti monster when you auto‑smooth. Stick to clean loops, keep an eye on the edge flow, and the vines will stay in the background, not the foreground.