What are your Modding Horror Stories?

[KoolHndLuke]

 Any one of us that has been modding for awhile have had at least a few frustrating episodes that make us want to pull out our hair or punch something. My experiences are limited to about 5 games so far.

 Witcher 3 just frustrated me to no end. Not only did it run like shit on my weak pc. there was this code in the game or something that wouldn't allow for anything other than texture mods. I tried and tried to make about 20 mods that I had work in that game- and never did.

 FO3 and NV were kinda tricky to mod in TTW. I got about 50-60 mods to work relatively well in that. But I did run into a fair share of problems with the main quest a few times and various locations- like the town with uncle Roe would crash on me no matter what in a 100 hr + game. Never could get some textures to look right.

 FO4 has been pretty good for me so far. I still get the odd ctd here and there- mostly from overtaxing my weak set-up. The funny thing is that my latest play-through I have been playing with the use combined objects=0 edit to the ini. and it has had no ill effects! I don't know why it works, but it helps with the scrap everything mod. This flies in the face of modding principals for the game according to most "experts". They all think I am lying or something.

 Skyrim has been the biggest pain by far!! That game straight up demands some wizardry to make playable with a large mod list. I have come close to smashing something, or peaking my blood pressure on that devil of game more times than I can count. If it is not simply freezing or ctds all the time, then it is screwing up with placement of objects, wacky physics, weird texture bugs, the sky turning up side down, suspended animations, npcs or followers disappearing, strange lighting effects, and on and on. Luckily I have learned how to fix or avoid all these issues for the most part. But Sky stubbornly refuses to cooperate fully with even some of the most experienced modders.

 

 So with that said, what are some game experiences with modding that would normally be lost to obscurity that you would like to share? Or maybe mod authors would like to share their pains with certain tools or games that were giving them fits?

[27X]

Witcher Three is only moddable for scripting and textures; and even those have a hard limit in both amount and scale, because CDPR didn't keep their promises.

 

As for personal experience, the RAGE engine is a nigh unusable clusterfuck; I've seen games with no dedicated modding utilities that have a better toolset than RAGE.

[MrEsturk]

Back in February I decided to revisit Skyrim. Having already played for countless hours in a modded but vanilla lore based form of the game I decided to back up my original copy and install a new, unaltered copy of the game. Then I set out to alter as much as possible to in order to turn the lore on its head and make it feel like a new yet familiar experience. Tropical Skyrim to completely replace the climate, SkyRe to change various system rules such as the perk trees and combat, mass NPC appearance replacers, a civil war overhaul mod, etc.

 

I also set out to replace all the vanilla armor/clothes/weapons with new designs, giving it an almost Asian rpg feel just for variety. This took about 3 weeks of work. Digging through countless mods to find designs I liked, altering them to replace vanilla costumes, having to run many of them through Outfit Studio to conform with one body type or adjust them to properly replace a vanilla mesh, making texture palette swaps, the grueling hassle of finding replacement male civilian clothes (good luck), etc. But finally I got through it all and was ready to do a playthrough my radically altered Skyrim....

 

....And then the game insisted on violently crashing every time I approached Riverwood. And even if I skipped Riverwood it would go completely unstable inside Whiterun or any other town. And if it crashed inside a town it would refuse to reload my save. By the time I accepted the game had become completely unplayable I had disowned Skyrim and swore I would never play it again.

 

Thankfully I came back to my project about a month ago, found out about some more crash fix mods for SKSE, and managed to get the blasted thing running. I also fell to the darkside and added some Sexlab mods into the game, hehe. I still get those damn "failed to allocate memory" crashes a lot, but at least not enough to make the game unplayable as it was before. So at least my work payed off in the end

[MadMansGun]

leaning to animate for skyrim:

 

and rebuilding/updating More Nasty Critters:

[Captain Cobra]

I opened the Fallout 4 CK.

[Yami X]

Nexus mod manager updating and fucking my Oblivion install it was marvelous it was perfect.....

 

Never Again.

[Captain Cobra]

W R Y E B A S H

R

Y

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B

A

S

H

[MrEsturk]

I opened the Fallout 4 CK.

 

Yeah... there's all of 3 NPCs the Fallout 4 CK will let me edit without violently crashing. The real infuriating part is I know what's causing it: the preview window. If the preview window could be toggled off like the default Skyrim CK setting everything would be fine. But of course not, so there's just a whole massive important feature of the tool I simply can't use due to a completely cosmetic feature a bloke from the DOS modding days like myself couldn't give a flying fuck about even having

 

If anyone knows an ini file setting that disables the character preview window let me know. I pretty gave up on dealing with the stupid thing and went back to messing with Oldrim.

[Rex89]

For me it was modding oblivion before mod managers existed my god that was mine melting (shivering )  and

Fallout new Vegas was a Constant fight to keep the game from crashing .

[Jolie Rouge]

Doing 15.4 GB of mods for a RTS and Sims 3 and Age of Pirates 2 and then the graphics card fried itself, moving everything to another machine and deal with a new OS and its quirks while reinstalling the stuff.

The good news is, my hd is still working..... 

[Myst42]

Nuking 50GB of unique modding content I spent years colecting, tweaking and creating, out of existence by a stupid mistake during a reinstall.

Make more backups

Make more backups

Make more backups

Make more backups

Make more backups

Make more backups

Make more backups...

[MrEsturk]

Nuking 50GB of unique modding content I spent years colecting, tweaking and creating, out of existence by a stupid mistake during a reinstall.

Make more backups....

I made that mistake back in 1998. Learned my lesson and have retained all my hard drive data ever since. Fun to think I have custom made Duke Nukem content that is nearly 20 years old and was never released online on my modern PC.

[Kuロi]

I have about 150g worth of mods on what I assume to be a dead drive. While I've recovered a fair share of them through random searching, I am constantly terrified that I might have had a few gems in there that I'll never find again.

 

And while not necessarily a story, Oblivion feels like shit to mod. Partly because the game doesn't necessarily have a big Youtube following of (charismatic) people showcasing mods, but most importantly, it feels like the modding community there is a lot more closed off than Skyrim. It just seems that whenever you see a picture of a beautiful character, any question about how to get similar looking character gets you an answer that boils down to either a personal mod or, more often than not, some combination of multiple mods that have been removed and may no longer be shared.

[Cynical Misanthrope]

Modding Oblivion And Skyrim has never really caused any issues for me, and if something that shouldn't happen, happen, I have always been able to figure out what problem was.

But FO3... I don't know why, but modding that game always drove me to the edge.

In general I have never used that many heavy scripted mods. I'm more of a weapon/armor mod type of user. I have used some of course, but then I have always read up about them and been really careful. However, I will say the road to mod up any games is my biggest grief. I haven't played any of these games for years, but I have started miss them and want to play again, but I just can't start over from scratch again. I just can't.

 

 

[Grine]

Creation Kit saving but fucking up and my big modding file becomes 1kb.
Thats when I burned shit down.

80% of mods in my mod folder are backups. I am not even kidding.

[Veladarius]

Fallout 3 - created single mods from a group of mods, all armor/clothing mods in one mod, all body mesh/textures in another mod and grouped several other sets of mods together. Used TESSnip to combine the esp's and edit them. Have used the program on some mods for Skyrim to remove unneeded Masters that TESVEdit would not remove.

 

Oblivion - Got to around 165 mods installed and it started dropping mods off the end of the list, would not load them at all.

 

Skyrim - have about 1100 mods in NMM (v.56) and usually run 240+ mods at once with a number of these being various merged mods. Spent 4 months hunting down mods that caused crashes until I could play as much as I wanted without crashing. HDD started dying but was able to recover everything but the NMM setup files and had to put all the mods back into it, took 2 days.

 

Skyrim CK - Crashing when trying to move dialogue to another topic. Creating a new topic and the dialogue boxes for it are grayed out so I have to save, exit and restart the CK. Damn temperamental dialogue scripts crashing the CK.

[Molevalence]

Give me any mod and I can break it. Hands down. I'm called "The Canadian Derp" for a reason.
 

[CaptainChaos]

I've been using NMM since day one. I let my load order go to Hell constantly, and really only ever have problem with script heavy mods or those early ones that relied on a lot of cloak spells. If a mod won't load right, I just repack it so it will. I never have any of the issues other people seem to have. I don't defend NMM over MO, but I have never moved over to something else because "it just works."

 

A recent one from learning bodyslide. An armor piece I really wanted had two separate parts. One would conform, one wouldn't. Nifscan found nothing. But at least I had one workable mesh, and I finally found that changing (I think) NiSkinData under Dismember made it conform. Took hours.

 

I was trying to get nudity in Saints Row 3 and 4. I wasn't going to bother, but I was already installing a bunch of clothing mod, so why the Hell not. I either got a barbie doll or the censoring. No idea what was going wrong, but it made me angry that I couldn't make it work. Followed the directions to the letter. Got even more mad and left it. Got drunk one night and decided to fix it. I don't know what I did, but when I woke up the next morning, it worked. So, moral is: mod drunk, mod well.

 

Way back, I made a shitty prison mod. Had made considerable progress on a new version while drunk out of my mind. No bugs, did what I wanted to. The big part was fixing the issue where you could remove items equpped by "equipitem XXXXXXX 1" by dumping them in a container. I don't know what I did, but it worked: you could not remove the items. I think I made them Quest Items, but I can't be sure. Somehow, when packaging the ESP, I copied over my V2 with V1, and had no backup.

 

I put the game (not just modding) down for almost a year after that.

 

Could never get the "googly eyes" shit fixed in Oblivion when I bothered to load Blockhead and body replacers. I had one set of eyes that worked for some reason, but man that dialog camera ranged from creepy to hilarious. When Patrick Stewart is all "Save the World" with a cross-eyed look on his face, hilarity.

[Bazinga]

Trying to get into Skyrim Scripting was definitely a test of fortitute and patience for me.

First setting up a tool that would even compile the scripts. Turns out you NEVER EVER script inside the Creation Kit itself. Someone should have told me before I wasted more than a dozen hours trying with that shit crashing every single time because Bethesda.

Then collecting all the necessary scripts and putting them in the same folder so the compiler sees them and doesn't keep spouting random indecipherable nonsense about errors and stuff.

Then trying to find proper documentation on the Sexlab API. At least I still had the Gitlab reference then. Now that that's gone all there seems to be left are the rather sparse comments inside the Sexlab scripts themselves.

And that Gitlab reference wasn't any good either. You know the feeling you get when reading documentation by programmers for programmers? That feeling of being left out, of not being in on some practical joke they seem to be playing on you? I certainly do.        

And the main Papyrus documentation wasn't much better either. None of these guys can explain anything at all, it's always just a few sparse sentences without properly setting up examples to follow and lots of code. All. the. fucking. time.

 

It's just as if programmers are not the most communicative people out there. 

[MadMansGun]

.

gitlab stuff can still be obtained with this (assuming you still have the address): http://archive.org/web/web.php

 

[Bazinga]

 

.

gitlab stuff can still be obtained with this (assuming you still have the address): http://archive.org/web/web.php

 

Yeah, didn't think of that, thanks. But I didn't have to either, since my forays into scripting are pretty much over.

Never again. 

[Alexa Rose]

As I don't like to bother modders and ask questions that they've probably heard dozens or hundreds of times, modding Skyrim during the first few months was a nightmare of ctds, frozen animations, and incredible lag.  And then I moved on to Bodyslide and had all new issues.  And then I decided I'd install an ENB and made stupid mistakes along the way. 

 

All of these issues could have been quickly resolved or altogether avoided if I had simply asked my questions on a mod's page, but now, I am happy to have struggled as I did.  When I encounter an issue, I usually have an idea for a solution right away.  And I still don't ask questions when I'm stumped; I just get a drink and settle in for a rollercoaster ride of "I fixed it!  Oh, it still won't work.  Wait, I fixed it!  Nope, not yet."

 

I've also learned that it's incredibly helpful to read the first ten or so pages of a mod's comments.  That small investment of time has saved me many, many headaches.

[germ]

I've been doing  this since Oblivion came out, so I've had alot of horror stories. Hard to even remember a specific event. But try going through a mod list that is 200+ mods long one by one to try to find the problematic mod. Done that a few times.

[NickNozownik]

I tried to make a custom summoned NPC in Skyrim who explodes when dying. Took me fucking ages because I don't know shit about scripts. First it didn't work at all, then it crashed, then the explosion did absolutely no damage. Took a lot of rage quitting Skyrim and getting back to CK. This one simple script caused a massive blyatfest.

 

I also tried to remove all the bullshit spells from the Deadly Wenches mods. I didn't know how to do that quickly so I simply deleted all the new spells, which caused almost every new NPC to disappear.

And of course random CK crashes, which means that 2 or 3 hours of modding went straight to the shitter.

[KoolHndLuke]

I tried to make a custom summoned NPC in Skyrim who explodes when dying. Took me fucking ages because I don't know shit about scripts. First it didn't work at all, then it crashed, then the explosion did absolutely no damage. Took a lot of rage quitting Skyrim and getting back to CK. This one simple script caused a massive blyatfest.

 

I also tried to remove all the bullshit spells from the Deadly Wenches mods. I didn't know how to do that quickly so I simply deleted all the new spells, which caused almost every new NPC to disappear.

And of course random CK crashes, which means that 2 or 3 hours of modding went straight to the shitter.

I have been messing with spells in the CK and have successfully removed spells from some npcs and changed them. I replaced Serana's spells with force push and summon dremora lord instead of raise dead since I play a necromancer and now its fun to watch her send enemies flying. I want to try force choke with her next. Maybe you can remove or replace DW spells the same way. You can give npcs new spells from mods like Apocalypse or others if you make them masters. I added spells from that mod to several npcs along with other things. Of course now my CK doesn't work anymore for some reason. I could usually get the CK to work about 20 mins before it would crash.