Starfield Extension 0.4.1 Hotfix

[Pickysaurus]

The 0.4.1 update for the Starfield Extension disables two new features added in the 0.4.0 based on many reports of unanticipated issues from the community with this update. More details on the issues have been included below.

 

 

The "My Games" Data folder and OneDrive

 

This workaround feature that allows all mods to load from the same location performed the following actions automatically when Vortex first started managing Starfield or each time Starfield was activated as the managed game.

• Checked if there's a Data folder in My Games\Starfield
• If there is, it makes a copy of the contents of that folder in the game Data folder.
• Back up the original folder by renaming it to "Data-backup-{timestamp}".
• Create a junction between the two folders to allow mods to be loaded from a single location.

The problem we did not anticipate was that the creation of this junction caused issues for some users who are using OneDrive to back up their My Documents folders. The OneDrive sync would be unaware that a junction had been created and continued as if the contents of the game data folder now existed inside the My Games/Starfield/Data folder. This would - in some cases - then cause OneDrive to attempt to back up around 120GB of data that did not need to be stored in the cloud. Unfortunately, it's also not possible to exclude certain folders from the backup so the only way to prevent the backup was to tell OneDrive to ignore the entire Documents folder. For a number of other users, the problem was less severe and simply paused the backup of the Documents folder until the junction had been removed.

 

For users who are affected by the issue, Vortex 0.4.1 will no longer automatically create the junction so it can be deleted to fix the OneDrive problem. If you are not having an issue with OneDrive it is perfectly fine to leave the junction in place, just be aware that Vortex will not recreate it if you delete it.

 

 

Comments in StarfieldCustom.ini

 

This feature checked that StarfieldCustom.ini exists at Documents/My Games/Starfield, created it if it was missing and verified that three values were set correctly. Upon finding the values missing or invalid, Vortex used the NPM module known simply as ini to import the current INI values and if required, make the adjustments and resave the corrected file.

 

A problem we hadn't foreseen is that due to the INI format being fairly poorly defined, the library we used for this operation considered a semi-colon to be a marker that showed the end of a value and the start of a comment. This meant that any INI values that included semi-colons such as "sStartingConsoleCommand=bat InstantScan; bat ISD5" any part of the value after the after the symbol was trimmed out.

 

Another smaller issue is that the INI parsing library did not retain comments added at the end of lines or on their own lines so these were unintentionally removed. While this is annoying, it would not have any detrimental effect on the game itself or how it reads the INI files. The StarfieldCustom.ini was not backed up before editing as we did not believe any critical data would be lost this way.

 

In 0.4.1, the INI file is now entirely manually managed, so make sure the values below are set correctly to both load mods properly and be able to use the "Open Photo Mode Folder" option in the mods tab.

[Archive]
bInvalidateOlderFiles=1
sResourceDataDirsFinal=
 
[Display]
sPhotoModeFolder=Photos

If you'd like to know more about what the INI settings do in Starfield, we highly recommend using BethINI to manage and update your game settings.

 

If you don't know why we wanted to make these changes in the first place, please read our news post for the 0.4.0 release.