I just can't get mods to load, no matter what.

[HadToRegister]

Yes, the game works if you happen to have a setup it works on. A lot of people don't. A lot of people have been having problems, and that's a fact. nearly all of these problems first started occurring immediately AFTER the 'update' by Bethesda. Also, a fact. I like facts. Its the only way I am going to get to the bottom of this.

 

I am not even really blaming Bethesda (aside from the fact they are breaking people's game for no real reason, since these are not 'patches', they are 'cash grabs'). Now, if I were crazy, everyone would just agree I am crazy and have a good laugh. People only get defensive about something when they are afraid they're may be a grain of truth in it. :wink:

But its looking more and more like its a byproduct of that update, not the update itself. I can get my game to run fine right now, so long as I do not start it through a Mod Organizer. Once I figure out why that is, I will try to help everyone else with the problem (although there are slight variances in the problems depending on your precise setup).

 

 

Sorry, but if what you're claiming was true, this thread and these forums would be full to the brim with people reporting the same exact problem as you.

Instead, I'm seeing you pop up in other peoples threads all over the forums just to add some hate towards whichever Mod Manager you're having trouble with at the time.

You've been through Vortex and Mod Organizer in just two days, then asking how to manually do your load order and install mods etc...

 

Instead, you are continuously met with confusion from other people wondering what you're talking about, and with people telling you "everything works fine here", because your particular problem seems to be unique to only you.

We'd help if we could, but you're also tacking some kind of 'conspiracy theory' about Bethesda on top of that, and seemingly blaming everybody else for your setup not working correctly, except yourself.

 

The byproduct of this seems to be based on the premise that you really don't seem to understand how Mod Organizer, (and Vortex) works, and aren't reading any of the subsequent tutorials or Manuals for either, as you were recently in the Vortex forum after trying Vortex and blaming Vortex (and Bethesda's CC) for your problems, and now you're doing the same thing but blaming Mod Organizer.

 

I would say take a step back for tonight, have a cool down, and read up on how Mod Organizer and Vortex works, because they are both based on similar mechanics, (They are also written by the same person), and have more of a learning curve than a simpler Mod Manager like NMM does.

Please don't hijack other people's threads.

[StormHUN]

Guys, could you please not hijack my thread for your arguments? :/

 

I'm just trying to figure out why my manually installed mods don't work while they work for other people. If anyone have advice about that I would greatly appreciate, but if you just want to argue about the various mod managers, or the difference between independent mods and Bethesda mods, please do it in your own thread becau7se these are irrelevant to my problem.

 

 

Though it gave me an idea. Right now the Mods menu item is grayed out in my game, and so is Creation Club. So I wonder if I could get those menus to work (which is a separate issue) maybe that would make the manual mods work too? My theory is simply that maybe because these menus are grayed out the game may have a global "mods are off" switch?

[HadToRegister]

Guys, could you please not hijack my thread for your arguments? :/

 

I'm just trying to figure out why my manually installed mods don't work while they work for other people. If anyone have advice about that I would greatly appreciate, but if you just want to argue about the various mod managers, or the difference between independent mods and Bethesda mods, please do it in your own thread becau7se these are irrelevant to my problem.

 

 

Though it gave me an idea. Right now the Mods menu item is grayed out in my game, and so is Creation Club. So I wonder if I could get those menus to work (which is a separate issue) maybe that would make the manual mods work too? My theory is simply that maybe because these menus are grayed out the game may have a global "mods are off" switch?

 

I'm trying to help you, it's the other guy who keeps hijacking everybody else's threads.

[MarkusTay]

Unlike other people who's attitude is, "You must be stupid", I have resolved my issue, and although I cannot promise you what I did will work for you, I will tell you what I did:

 

By reading through the logs of F4SE - which I found on the 'C' drive nowhere near where I have F4SE - I discovered it couldn't find a file called 'Place.ini', which I then went on to find was part of Place Anywhere. Now, I have come to realize a lot of people would have been "why hadn't you just disabled all your mods and turned them back on one by one?" Well... that's not how I work. I KNOW my load order and everything else worked fine just before the update, ergo I wanted to find the culprit. Just reinstalling stuff will never tell you what went wrong, which will leave it open for the same problem to rear its head again in the future. So all that being said...

 

I found I had NO 'Place.ini' on my computer. Strange, since I must have had one at some point. On the page for that mod I found the author saying if you don't have 'Place.ini', then just "rename place_example.ini to place.ini". However, I found that file in my mods folder under the mod itself (Place Everywhere), in the F4SE folder under 'Plugins'. This is in the wrong place - you need to copy the 'Plugins' folder over to the place where you have F4SE itself, which is under your Fallout 4 folder in Steam under F4SE. You'll find an EMPTY folder that says 'plugins' - that's where the plugins folder I just described is supposed to go. So C&P it (the one in the mods folder) over the Plugins folder in the Steam/Steamapps\common\Fallout 4\Data\F4SE (there are other files in there I assume you need), and THEN change place_example.ini to place.ini, just as the author of that mod described.

 

I hope that works for others. I truly doubt it will work for everyone, but if one file got 'misplaced' during this 'upgrade', then we can assume its a distinct possibility others have as well.

 

As for blame... I don't know if it was F4SE or 'Place Everywhere' that made the error (both worked perfectly on my machine pre-update), but I can now say it wasn't a Windows update to the file structure, nor directly Bethesda's update. As to why things were still working for a lot of people - I would hazard to guess it had to do with HOW one went about upgrading everything. I chose to completely delete and then reinstall the newest version of F4SE, which probably got rid of the working version of the folder. Others may have chose 'merge' rather then 'replace' as an option, which probably would have left the old folder intact (being as the new folder was empty and contained nothing to overwrite the older Plain folder).

So yeah... I resolved my issues... MY WAY. And learned a lot in the process.

 

Ya'll excuse me, I have a Commonwealth to get back to. Cheers

[MarkusTay]

I went into a lot of detail about my process above - I always do. I could have just said what to do, but as I stated above, this particular fix probably won't work for a lot of people. This is why I described my procedure and how I was missing a file - if others have a problem they can follow the procedure itself, and maybe they will find they were also missing files, or had misplaced files, even if they weren't the same as mine. Check your logs - i would have never caught that had I not found the logs themselves (which as I said, were on the 'c' drive, since that seems to be where Windows insists all game-related files should go).

 

I hope this helps someone - Mark

 

 

EDIT: One caveat - I have no idea how this will work on an old save. I haven't tried it yet. I started a game using just the F4SE to start Steam and then the game, and that ran fine... but without any mods. After leaving the Vault and meeting Codsworth I then saved, and loaded everything through MM2 (using F4SE) like I always did, and it finally worked. Maybe running the game without the mod organizer first also helped - I do not know. But I do know I had the exact same problem as the OP a couple of days ago, and now my game works fine. As far as I can tell, every single one of my mods is working correctly.

[Guest deleted34304850]

To the OP (not the thread hijacking conspiracy theorist who caused all his own issues) - did you follow the advice from Hadtoregister - and literally start over again?

Reading your steps up to the point of your last update, it seems that you had a system that was never going to work due to the fact that you had several ini edits and several duplicate files.

I'd be interested in finding out if you would do something like - have steam validate the integrity of you game files, then, once that has completed, simply start the game with no mods, no nothing, and see if you can get the game to start. If you can get to that point, of a working FO4 install, simply quit the game, and at that point, attempt to mod the game with a single mod, and see how you go?

Literally baby steps.

If you can get a vailla game going, that's step one completed. After you're at that point, you can edit your falloutcustom.ini and enable moding with the following two lines;

 

[Archive]
bInvalidateOlderFiles=1
sResourceDataDirsFinal=

 

Then you can apply a single mod.

 

start the game and see if it tells you that mods are loaded/achievements disabled and continue on, and if the game plays on, that's step two completed and you're now on the way.

 

Can you try that - and let us know how you get on?

Don't duplicate any files, or make any other edits to the ini files, just start with those basic steps and see what occurs?

[StormHUN]

UPDATE:

 

First of all I have to point out that placing a TXT file in a folder it shouldn't be can cause absolutely zero problems. The game is not going to do anything with a file it is not looking for so copying those files to a few places to see if it happens is not causing any damage.

 

I since have reinstalled but not because of this, but because I tried to use a config tool that broke my installation. Reinstalling didn't fix anything though.

 

HOWEVER, I have finally found the correct load order file. It exists, but in the wrong place. For whatever reason it is found here: Users/USERNAME/Local Settings/Application Data/Fallout4/DLCList.txt instead of Users/USERNAME/AppData/Local/Fallout4/ and it's called DLCList.txt instead of plugins.txt. And now if I add a new mod manually, the game will even add that mod to DLCList.txt. So this part seems to work just fine.

 

But mods are still not taking effect.

 

If you can get to that point, of a working FO4 install, simply quit the game, and at that point, attempt to mod the game with a single mod, and see how you go?

The vanilla game has always worked, only modding didn't. That is, until the customization tool I tried broke it and forced me to reinstall it.

 

 

you can edit your falloutcustom.ini and enable moding with the following two lines;

 

[Archive]
bInvalidateOlderFiles=1
sResourceDataDirsFinal=

Did that the first time too, now did it again and still no luck. I have then also added bEnableFileSelection=1 as most guides suggest, but that didn't cut it either.

Edited December 16, 2018 by StormHUN

[MarkusTay]

One other thing I tried since yesterday, although I don't know if it helped at all (but it sure as heck didn't hurt) - almost everywhere you read about the two files you have to change to mod (the two you guys just mentioned), but sometimes I come across videos, etc. that say to change something else. One I tried the other day with disastrous results (couldn't start at all, with any method), but it was easy enough to change things back. The other I tried (and my game is since working, but I did several other things as I've said so your mileage may vary) is that you have to change ANOTHER ini - you can see that

. It certainly didn't hurt anything, and I reiterate - my problem was the same as yours... I was unable to load any mods for a week (since the update... which apparently I caused myself... go figure...)

 

EDIT: I just re-read your OP - my apologies. You have already tried adding that line so don't bother watching that video. Are you running F4SE? If so, try reading the logs you'll find where you find the ini files (not anywhere near the game files). That is how I spotted my problem.

 

EDIT2: Okay, just re-read the whole thread to make sure we are on the same page - one thing I tried that you did not is did you check your folder permissions? Windows seems to have a nasty habit of changing your permissions back to 'read only' (also a fact - I got that right off of some Windows forums). If you see your permissions have changed, make sure they STICK. You may have to 'take ownership' of the folder.

 

Steam folder, the mod folder - anywhere pieces of the game may be stored, and things that help with the game, like F4SE, Mod Organizers, etc... need to be 'writeable'.

[HadToRegister]

One other thing I tried since yesterday, although I don't know if it helped at all (but it sure as heck didn't hurt) - almost everywhere you read about the two files you have to change to mod (the two you guys just mentioned), but sometimes I come across videos, etc. that say to change something else. One I tried the other day with disastrous results (couldn't start at all, with any method), but it was easy enough to change things back. The other I tried (and my game is since working, but I did several other things as I've said so your mileage may vary) is that you have to change ANOTHER ini - you can see that

. It certainly didn't hurt anything, and I reiterate - my problem was the same as yours... I was unable to load any mods for a week (since the update... which apparently I caused myself... go figure...)

 

EDIT: I just re-read your OP - my apologies. You have already tried adding that line so don't bother watching that video. Are you running F4SE? If so, try reading the logs you'll find where you find the ini files (not anywhere near the game files). That is how I spotted my problem.

 

EDIT2: Okay, just re-read the whole thread to make sure we are on the same page - one thing I tried that you did not is did you check your folder permissions? Windows seems to have a nasty habit of changing your permissions back to 'read only' (also a fact - I got that right off of some Windows forums). If you see your permissions have changed, make sure they STICK. You may have to 'take ownership' of the folder.

 

Steam folder, the mod folder - anywhere pieces of the game may be stored, and things that help with the game, like F4SE, Mod Organizers, etc... need to be 'writeable'.

 

 

Will you PLEASE stop hijacking this person's thread with your bad advice?

[MarkusTay]

Will some neutral party please compare the last two posts, and explain which of the two was at least attempting to help someone (because I had THE SAME EXACT PROBLEM, which I SOLVED), while the other post was pure harassment.

 

You sure as heck weren't able to help me - all you did was belittle my efforts. In fact, your probably pissed my game is running perfectly now.

 

@StormHUn - I am sorry you had to deal with this crap. I truly hope you resolve your issue. I'm out.