hello all,

so ive reched the tree of shades, and i approach the green stone, the shady black smoke appears and forms, i save and uit, when i come back where my clone hsould be is the stone....help?

:whisper: First, have a read of one of the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/323312-important-oblivion-general-forum-information-/page__view__findpost__p__5215303 (and anyone else who hasn't yet :stare: ). Especially the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/323312-important-oblivion-general-forum-information-/page__view__findpost__p__5215836 part posted right in one of the top pinned threads here in the Oblivion General forums. It's up there even in CAPS, but for some reason still seems to get ignored by too many people.

@ OP: You don't go into a whole lot of detail outlining your problem, so some may be able to give better advice to your specific problem.

Have a look on the UESP page for this quest and maybe you'll find something you missed or that your game has triggered one of the bugs listed further down the page.
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Shivering:Symbols_of_Office

So I've reached the tree of shades, and I approach the green stone, the shady black smoke appears and forms, I save and quit, when I come back where my clone should be is the stone....help?

So you went into the Tree of Shades and you approached to green stone that you activate and a black smoke has come up and a shadow self of your character appears and you save a quit after that. You went back to your game activate the stone again and your angry clone did not appear?

Are you on a pc?

You should of not save a quit during that or at any fight in the game. You get glitches. Go to your last save or auto save. In your last part of your question when I come back where my clone should be is the stone....help? the clone is yourself not the stone. Your clone should be some where with you. You should of save before you touched that stone and saved after the fight. Never quit when you in a fight in Oblivion. Thing happens.

Like the above poster say this should be in the gameplay, spoilers, tips and hint section.

right ok ill go into more detail...

first off, i did not quit before the clone appeared, and yes i am on the pc

secondly, when i steeped near the stone, it did activate, but when the black smoke cleared there was no clone, after saving and quitting i find where the lcone hsould be standing ( where the black smoke lands) is the green stone,

also, to increase game performance i have only got 1 save :sadvaultboy: ,

a quick way to get around this problem wouuld be to set the stage past this,

if you can htink of a soloution, or ifnd a site where it can tell me how to jump this stage, please reply quickley

For future reference, limiting your number of saves so severely does nothing to improve game performance. It does free up a miniscule amount of space on your HDD--but if you're that cramped for space on your drive, you're going to have bigger problems beyond game performance anyway.

I know Morrowind has an issue with having too many saves in the Saves folder; can't remember if Oblivion has the same problem. Even if it does, the number of saves you have to have before stuff starts acting wonky is in the 100-200 range. So there's no harm in keeping multiple saves--I usually have 15-20 at any given time.

Having one save (particularly if it's just the autosave...please tell me it's not the autosave) actually creates more issues, since you can't roll your game back in the event of a problem like this. Likewise, if your solitary save gets corrupted, that's it--it's done. In this case, when your clone failed to appear (which I think is the problem you're having?), you should not have saved over your existing save. That makes fixing the problem infinitely more difficult.

You can try advancing the quest stages manually. There's a list of http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Shivering:Symbols_of_Office on the UESP wiki. I think 160 is the one you want, depending on what your last journal entry for this quest is. However, that doesn't guarantee the rest of the quest will proceed normally.

In the future, I highly recommend that you consider keeping more than just one save on hand.