Persistent unintended side effects from unwanted mods?

[SteelRook]

I'm facing a rather serious issue which I believe is related to modding, though in a roundabout way. At one point, I downloaded and activated a great many mods from the Workshop without really reading what they did. Eventually I removed some of them via the "Ignore Missing Content" mod, which naturally caused the save game to become corrupted, exactly as the mod warned me. However, the problem is that the issue has persisted even after disabling all mods. The issue in question is:

 

Dud Proving Grounds projects. For instance, I'll start an Experimental Powered Weapons project. When that completes, it tells me that the project has completed, but doesn't give me an item. Normally when I get an item, the pop-up tells me what item I got, not that the project has completed. This happens only sometimes but not at other times, leading me to believe that the game is trying to generate an item which doesn't exist. It's basically impossible for me to troubleshoot which mod is causing this issue when it happens even without the mods.

 

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? I can list the mods I have downloaded on my system right now, both active and inactive if you feel that's relevant, but it just seems highly unlikely that extra tattoos or ini tweaks to the UI could be causing this to happen and I don't want to just blame mods on basic suspicions. The mere fact that this issue happens even when all mods are disabled... Concerns me. Forget making mods, I can barely make the ones I already have work.

[davidlallen]

Have you tried completely emptying out My Documents\My Games\XCOM 2\XComGame\Config ? This is where all the ini files are written, after mixing together the game ini files and all the mod ini files. For sure, I have seen leftover ModOverride lines in the XComGame.ini file, [Engine.engine] section. Once you empty out this area, when the game starts, it will rebuild all of them.

 

I have heard reports that random crashes happen, possibly for the sequence:

1. Player installs mod A, version 1

2. Player saves a game with mod A, version 1

3. Mod A developer releases version 2, steam workshop silently updates

4. Player loads saved game. The check "is this mod loaded?" passes so no reinitialization is done

5. Random things happen because mod A version 2 expects certain data, which is not there.

[SteelRook]

I have not, actually. I'll go do that right now. However, here's what I did try:

 

If I "verify integrity of game cache" the problem goes away on first launch. As soon as I enable seemingly any mod whatsoever, however, the bug reasserts itself. I've tried clicking the "reload" button on the Mods launcher which wipes out mod selection. Following that, the problem goes away on first launch. As before, however, it reasserts itself as soon as I enable any mod whatsoever. I hadn't thought to disable the ini files for fear of deleting my own saved games (an empty fear, I know), but I'll go try that and get back to you.

[SteelRook]

Nope, same as before, which blows my mind... I deleted all of the config files, ran the game and the issue isn't there. As soon as I reenabled my tattoo mods, the issue returned. I don't understand how texture additions, prop additions and a mod which adds more parcels to map generation can ever impact the Advanced Warfare Centre. I thought this was being caused by either the Ultimate Workshop or the Armoury Extension mods but those aren't actually active! I'll try deleting all the mods I'm not actually running and see what happens. By "clearing" I mean "unsubscribing and deleting them from my workshop." I don't like doing that as it might mess with mod-makers' metrics, though...

 

*edit*

Nope! Even that didn't work. This time I wasn't able to build Experimental Powered Weapons even with no mods active...

Edited March 3, 2016 by SteelRook

[davidlallen]

idk ... unsubscribe from all your steam mods, let them update so all the folders are empty, delete all the workshop folders, resubscribe?

 

The way most mods work, they add stuff into your game state upon startup, which is saved. So if you had any mods active when you saved the game, their stuff will still be in there when you load that save. It is painful, but what happens if you start a new campaign with no mods? You can cheat yourself through all the missions with console commands like levelupbarracks, killallais, etc.

[SteelRook]

I have a game saved without any mods, which is what I'm using to test this with. That was pure vanilla from before I downloaded anything whatsoever. Without mods, it works just fine, but as soon as I activate any of them - no matter which one - the problems start all over. I've not tried starting a new game as I don't know how to test the Proving Grounds, but the old save game displays the exact same issue as the new one created with all the mods enabled. That the issue persists even when I disable all the mods tells me it's rooted somewhere in the way in which mods are handled, possibly even in ModBuddy itself since I have a few "local" mods from that, as well.

 

I'll try unsubscribing from all mods tomorrow at some point, just... frustrating, is all.

[SteelRook]

So... Apparently something bigger is afoot here. I removed all of my mods, deleted the mods folder entirely... And I'm still getting that issue. Something somewhere in the game itself is horribly wrong, so my next available recourse is a full reinstall. This is so damn weird... Do you know if my mods will survive a full reinstall? I put them all back because they were sitting in a lot of open windows.

 

Do you have any idea what could cause the Experimental Powered Weapons project to complete without giving me a powered weapon? Like maybe a class somewhere got corrupted? Could ModBuddy be causing this, somehow? Is there like a list of items to show up in the proving grounds available somewhere?

Edited March 3, 2016 by SteelRook

[abeclancy]

Had issues with some vague mod data persisting, posted this in another thread, was told maybe you'd be interested:

 

I (roughly) deleted the following files/directories in their entirety (even my local save files), revalidated through steam, restored XCOM 2 and XCOM 2 SDK from my local copies of them, then rebuilt and it worked. Worth noting, I didn't delete the workshop mods when I was fixing my issue (I believe that when you are debugging, XCOM 2 doesn't load workshop mods at all, since they don't appear in the launcher mod list).

• Users/name/AppData/Local/Firaxis
• Users/name/AppData/Roaming/Firaxis
• Users/name/Documents/Firaxis ModBuddy
• Users/name/AppData/Local/CrashDumps/XCom2.exe.*.dmp
• Users/name/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/WER/ReportArchive/AppCrash_XCom2.exe_*
• Users/name/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/WER/ReportArchive/AppHang_XCom2.exe_*
• Users/name/Documents/My Games/XCOM2
• Users/name/Documents/Visual Studio 2013/Settings/XCOM ModBuddy

I know that the game's workshop mods are stored somewhere in steamapps\workshop (I think workshop\content\268500), maybe unsubscribing from all mods, deleting that directory, then revalidating XCOM through steam would help.