I need serious help. OBSE, OCOv2, Blockhead, not working.

[ContraChaos]

I have used 2 different NMM (s),with Wrye Bash, independently and together. I have dragged and dropped OBSE into my Oblivion folder located in my Steam Games folder (I have looked, had a friend look and still cant find the Oblivion.exe File in the Oblivion folder), some mods worked like arrive by ship mod, some worked partly like Oblivion Character Overhaul 2 mod, yes I am also experiencing trouble with blockhead...It keeps showing as mod not a plugin and not working like OBSE. Some would break my game, black screen before crashing. I have followed youtube videos down to the last detail (Zuul I think/among others), followed lists like Bevilex modlist for oblivion and they all showed me different ways of getting these mods to work and none of them are working like shown, something always goes wrong. I am at my wits end, I am currently willing to sell my soul for someone to help me as I am so frustrated. I have uninstalled everything and reinstalled Oblivion. ,I'm just college student wanting to play modded oblivion, cant a woman catch a brake here? Anyone willing to help please do. My next step is to annoy people on facebook and or pay someone in my area to help, which I dont want to do. (p.s. also wtf does Vanilla Oblivion mean?)

[DrakeTheDragon]

Well, first off, "Vanilla" usually means like out-of-the-box, in this case "without mods".

 

 

Then, you can't even see the Oblivion.exe (suffix might be hidden though, but an executable icon by the name "Oblivion" at least should be there) inside your game's Oblivion folder? Are you sure you're looking into the correct folder?

 

What OS is it you're on, by the way, and where do you have your game / Steam installed to? If it is inside program files and on Windows Vista and upwards, you're highly likely falling victim to the infamous User Account Control (UAC) over-protecting these folders so almost nothing can touch them. In that case 3rd party apps like mod managers, but sometimes also the user, aren't allowed to access these folders but will instead be interacting with a "VirtualStore" folder found somewhere inside your User folders. The Windows Explorer will lie to you and show you files from this folder inside the program files folder, which aren't actually there, but the game and tools can't be fooled and won't find them.

 

It is usually the first step to "move" your Oblivion install to a folder outside of program files, or any other of the over-protected system folders, that is like every folder Windows created on install. This can also be done in/with Steam, of course, but I don't know myself about how.

 

And launching mod managers with the "run as admin" option from the right-click context menu, or configured to always run as admin in the file's properties, is also often recommended to counteract this. You being logged in on the account that is the admin to your Windows OS is "not" the same and won't work here.

 

(Though perhaps the Oblivion.exe not showing also is a Steam thing? I wouldn't know.)

 

 

And then keep in mind not all "mods" also have "plugins" or masterfiles. Mod managers will usually always show some entry for the mod, but not every mod will have an entry inside the plugins. Only ESP and ESM files will show up there.

OBSE, Blockhead, etc., in particular aren't "mods" per say. Those are rather executables and/or DLLs hooking into the game when it's started. OBSE or Blockhead f.e. are neither mods nor plugins, and they're unlikely to be manageable with most mod managers, i.e. should rather be installed manually instead.