So here I am, having a bad Oblivion day. The worst.

Today I learned my 30+ gig, 300+ mod Oblivion install has a corrupt FCOM start and how I have to do the entire thing ... again. From the bottom up. Weeks of work (and that is no exageration) ... invalidated. Luckily, I can salvage some of my install, but I still have to go through a lot of the process again.

So what was your worse Oblivion day? You know, the one where you sat staring at the computer thinking .... you know, Cyrodill is great but this may not be worth it anymore ...

~ Dani ~

I haven't really had one Dani. Now that you mention it though, I do recall having to reload a few Fighter's Guild quests, and the Knights of the White Stallion quest, over, and over, and over, and over. It was very annoying. Eventually I had to reload to a time where I hadn't even started those quests. :/ I don't really know if that'll make you feel better, as I have no idea how frustrating corrupt mods can be, but I imagine you must get so frustrated you want to feed your HDD to a Daedroth. Feel better soon.

Cheers,

Grizzly

I think I can top yours. I had a file on PS3 GotY edition with more than 500 hours of gameplay, once. All the main quests and most of the side quests done, all my skills maxed, my Skingrad house all decked out with all kinds of rare loot. Pretty much anything you can think of to do in Oblivion, I had done. But alas, I said "had" because one day I turned on my PS3 and it said "Error: Harddrive not detected"

It's the closest I've been to crying in a while!

(At least Sony was willing to ship me a new PS3 on the warranty. And my new files are getting backed up to my PC regularly )

Have you tried just merging mods? The game can only handle 255 mods effectively.

It's an unfortunate fact that this is part of enjoying mods. Then again, with the complexity of games and systems today, it's pretty much also a fact of any game of reasonable complexity or system that could run such a game (like the PS3 crash noted already).

Not that that fact makes us feel any better when it happens, of course.

Still, just watch the "Making of Oblivion" video and note Todd Howard telling his crew that their demo machine for E3 just crashed right before the trade show. It doesn't only happen to us...

Thanks for the tip. I'm familiar with merging mods (and, in fact, had merged over 70) and with using Wrye Bash's merge and ghost features. As of this morning, my Wrye Bash mod indicator identified 238 active .esps of 290 installed. So that wasn't the problem ...

When I say my install was "corrupt" I mean that it was simply done wrong. I installed FCOM relying upon outdated information. I did my FCOM install in late July, early August; the FCOM thread was updated with new install information in late August. That information invalidated my install.

I could suppose I could have tried to play through, just hoping it would all turn out right, but that was a risk I just wasn't willing to take. Nothing like getting 200 hours into a game and realizing your screwed because your install isn't correct.

@ Sovern: Yes, I do think you topped me. Sorry about your loss . . .

~ Dani ~

I feel bad that something I said might have caused you to do a complete reinstall. I'm truly sorry. Believe me, I know what a difficult, tedious process it can be to install FCOM. If it's any consolation, I've decided to start over with a fresh install myself, having been away for a few months, so I'll be going through a fresh FCOM install right along with you.

But!... before you go to all that trouble I would seriously try installing Enhanced Economy over Living Economy and see what happens. It's entirely possible that, being an .ini-based mod, Enhanced may simply over-ride Living Economy. I think it's worth a try. You could always ask TheNiceOne in his EE thread and see what he thinks about it.

Whatever you end up doing I hope it goes as smooth as possible and that this whole thing doesn't turn out to be too frustrating.

Pseron, please don't feel bad. You only identified a symptom, which helped me identify a larger problem. If it hadn't been for you, I might have played to 200 hours and then discovered problems.

I was very frustrated earlier, but more with a lack of organized communication than anything you did. As a friend told me once, this is the bane of free modding - people have wonderful creativity and poor communication skills. There was - and still is - conficting information regarding FCOM installation in various locations - Corepc's FCOM thread of August 28 resolves those issues (I hope).

The very thing that makes this situation frustrating - all the time I spent reading readmes, learning to merge mods, learning more about Wrye Bash, organizing and saving every single mod I installed onto a back-up drive - in short, all that work and effort, is what's saving me now. Luckily, when I merged over 50+ armor and weapon mods, I actually saved the plug-in and resources onto my back-up drive. So I should be able reinstall it all at once.

But, yes, there will be some rebuilding. It is what it is - but it is in no way your fault. So, please, don't feel bad. I'm glad you saved me from a larger problem.

~ Dani ~

It is terrible that you have to go to that much work Dani.

A friend of mine was playing on PS3 when the Abomb bug corrupted his game. He had an Orc warrior with 320 hours and was only 2 quests away from completing the MQ. The game went flying across the room and he hasn't played it since. It broke his heart.....

I am always trying to get him to play again. He says he will one day. He still rates Oblivion as his fav game.

Fingers crossed for both him and you. :nod:

I've been there. Well, almost. I've never had an FCOM install, but i've had to to redo my load order many times. I tried FCOM install once, but i ended up with a "Missing Master" like CTD with only Oblviion.esm loading

Frustrating part is that i have the Steam version, and despite having backup on hard drive Steam still needs to download ~800 MB after the install (the DLC maybe?) which takes a while on my 1Mbps connection.

Current install has 234 plugins and takes 22GB, redoing it would be pretty easy since almost all of them are are omods or BAIN's, fortunately i see no need to reinstall anytime in the near future. (Note self, STAY OUT OF NEXUS! :stare:)

Still installing and sorting mod propblems is a part of the fun for me

My worst Oblivion day happened about three months ago. My desktop got attacked by a virus that destroyed a mod I'd spent nearly a year working on. Had that not happened, it would have been released either this month or next. Needless to say, I contemplated doing many...questionable...things to whoever sent me that virus, if I could find them.

That's a damn shame, but hopefully you learned the art of backing up important data?

Sorry Gothgirl my sympathy.
No bad days like yours, I hope you get back in the game and not put off.

Severus Snape got hit by the Abomb at around 300 hours as best I recall. I continued to play for a long time hoping it would eventually straighten itself out. I don't remember for sure now if I used Wrye Bash to fix it or if it cleared up on it's own but I keep thinking it finally just straightened out by itself. Of course, during that time, I tended to avoid doors.

Bah. A bad day in Oblivion is better than a good day at work!

Gotta admit I've always kept mods to a minimum partly because of the kind of woes you're having. Currently I've got nothing but SI installed. Not even KOTN & the official DLC since I inadvertently left my disk behind this summer. Game runs a lot better, too. Never crashes, except occasionally on exit. Plain old vanilla can be a refreshing change of flavor.

Mara

On my last install I played like 500 hours on one save and got the abomb bug, but I had never experienced it before so I had no idea what it was so I uninstalled and deleted all my mods, saves and the game and then recently found out what it was and that wrye bash could fix it

My worst Oblivion day? The day I bought the game.

It did indeed. I keep backups on flash drives, external hard rives and online storage sites now. There will not be a repeat loss.

Chalk another victim up for the A-bomb glitch. Everyone knows the feeling when they put in a lot of time with one of their first/ earliest characters, discovering everything on your own. The first few characters in my games seem to have the most character that way. Then along comes the A-bomb and I have to start a new character and one of my unique first characters gone. Of course since then I've restarted with the same kind of character build, several times, but I just can't seem to savor these later characters as much as I did my earlier one.

Fair enough. That's good advice. Of course, since it was FCOM and the install was incorrect, I supposed I'd just have a backup copy of an incorrect install?

I do in fact have: (1) backups of all the original mods I installed and I did (2) make a backup of all my .esps before I uninstalled Oblivion (this allows me to reuse .esps I've tweeked and cleaned). Also, I have backups of my merges, I would just need to reinstall the resources. So ... not a total loss ... and the reinstall is going very, very smoothly.

However, now that I'm almost almost fourteen hours into my new install, I see you do raise an intersting point. What about a large scale backup? A backup of my install with FCOM, Better Cities, Unique Landscapes and Weather: All Natural installed. Or for that matter, my entire install. Seems as if I tried this before and there was a problem with the OMOD (Oblivion Mod Manager) resources. Of course the install would have to be correct or it's just a waste of space, but if it was, could I just reinstall Oblivion and paste the Bethesda directory and the Oblivion directory from the My Documents/My Games directory into their places?

Has anyone made this work?

~ Dani ~

i top yours!

my oblivion was ruined, wouldn't start even whitout mods -.-.

I reinstalled oblivion(yeah i didn't save my mods because i thought some of them caused it)

and it still wouldn't start. i deleted my save games in a desperate act (yeah actually i did -.-)
still didn't work... removed my ini as a joke because i thought my cd was [censored] started oblivion and was going to check if it worked whitout the ini file.
guees what? it started since i had [censored] up my ini, and when i deleted it i got a fresh one -.-
I KNOW i top yours!

You're right. That really, really svcks. Sorry.

~ Dani ~

Doing part of the main quest and getting close to the end a guy i had to fight wasnt there and i couldnt go back outside the building...and the previous save was 9 hours before hand

I got pushed off of Dive Rock by the Adoring Fan once. :sadvaultboy:

I keep a virgin, unmodded copy of my Data folder (Oblivion, Shivering Isles and DLCs) saved to a different hard drive. Whenever I want to start over fresh (as I will be doing in the next few days) I have only to rename my old Data folder and then copy the unmodded Data folder to my Oblivion folder. I re-install Bash, generate a new .ini and I'm ready to begin installing mods. It works great and it's very easy to do.

I'm kind of tempted to save this next FCOM install too. The problem I see with that idea, of course, is that the folder will become obsolete if and when any FCOM components get updated. But I may just do it anyway. A fully-tested, working base copy of FCOM is mighty tempting.