I "Fudged" up pretty bad.... (original BSA filles)

[Andrewb95]

Hey everyone,

I joined nexus mods very recently, started adding mods, all was going well. I added a weather mod which I realised (in hindsight) caused trouble with textures. To make a long story short I ended up unknowningly extracting the original BSA files for mesh and texture and putting them into data. My question is this: have I made a horrible mistake? Is this an issue which will break/ruin the game or am I OK? If it is a terrible mistake is there any way to fix it? And finally can I still add mods after this? I use obmm to add mods I'm completely new to this so please don't roast me too harshly ð­ any and all help appreciated!

[DrakeTheDragon]

There is a still unsolved after all these years discussion about the benefits or drawbacks of extracting all of the Vanilla BSAs instead of letting the game load all its files from inside them. Best judge for yourself, if your performance increased or decreased. Other than that you shouldn't really have any further complications caused by it.

 

Every replacer-type mod you install will overwrite the extracted Vanilla file, provided you allow it to, and the effect will be the same as when not having the Vanilla files extracted and the replacer files being used over the ones from inside the BSA through Archive Invalidation.

 

As long as you have the Vanilla BSA files lying around unaltered, you can always go back, restore lost files, repair damages.

 

What you will be having trouble with now is undoing the step you're uncertain about, if you also installed other replacer-type mods already afterwards. Removing all the extracted Vanilla files from your folders again could now also remove the replacements and thus damage those mods. But even so, even if you loose all your replacer mods by completely removing all files extracted from the BSA, you can still fix even this by simply re-installing all those mods afterwards. Oblivion ain't so touchy as its younger descendants.

[Andrewb95]

Firstly,

Thanks for the speedy reply! Unfortunately I somehow extracted the original vanilla bsa files so I no longer have backup vanilla bsa files! Is there any way to repack them, do I need to or am I freaking out for no reason? Again, thanks for the help!

[DrakeTheDragon]

If you just "extracted" them, they won't be gone... unless you "deleted" them afterwards as well.

 

If so, it depends on the distribution type of your game. In Steam there's a button to "verify" the game files, which will re-install any missing ones. (It might also undo some replacements though!) But I'm not a Steam user, so I don't know any details.

I'd be very surprised, if GOG didn't have a similar function as well.

And when from retail discs, well, there's ways to get these back, too. I'd need to check my disc to know for sure in which way they're stored on it. But likely they'll be checked away inside some archive you can extract to get them back. And if all else fails, a re-install. As Oblivion doesn't come with any loose files at all, your replacer mods shouldn't be affected by a re-install, but it again depends on the files. Your INI files and other stuff especially would get lost, so it'd be best to make backups first.

 

edit: Oh, and, as long as your game works, you're basically freaking out for no reason, yes. There's lost of people claiming extracting the BSAs and deleting them afterwards would've improved their performance, and their games did not explode.

[Andrewb95]

OK so, I have the retail disc, so maybe I'll do some hunting and see if I can dig up the bsa files. I mainly want them for peace of mind, just to know that if I need to I can restore oblivion. Apart from that I was playing oblivion after disabling the mod which I'm 90% sure caused the texture problems in the first place and it seemed to be running fine, even with other mods I had installed. I think I'm going to go ahead and keep modding/playing oblivion as it seems like extracting the original bsa isn't a game breaker. Thanks!