To me that looks like problems with different languages. Maybe you are running a non-english language for your game or maybe some mods haven't been 100% translated in their setup files? My guess is that some descriptions are simply off in some setup files and you have nothing to worry about. For eg. that is how something like Russian or Japanese would appear if your system is US English and your font doesn't support the character set.

Not a bad idea, probably deserves it's own thread. The thing is, when EET and IWD-in-EET become officially available in BWS, a lot is probably going to change in that regard. Personally I've just been messing around with BG1EE until it happens and I'm getting more and more impatient as time goes by Want to play so badly but also want to wait for EET until I do so.

 

The only real advice I could give is to look everything up. There is a button with an exclamation mark (!) on it when you select a mod in BWS, this will take you to that mod's homepage where hopefully the mod author has provided adequate information. What I usually do personally is start off with the 'recommended' selection and work from there. Generally, it selects the quality stuff and leaves out the questionable stuff and beyond that it is up to your personal taste in custom NPCs and Quests etc. The only section I go through with a fine toothed comb is the 'rules and tweaks' section but again, the 'recommended' selection is mostly spot on with this for me with just a few changes here and there.

Thanks man, those will be a good place to start finding out what I need to know, ultimately I'm probably going to want to create my own mod altogether. I think the devs must have been drunk when they were creating the familiars but there are a few things about them that irk me.. I haven't looked into the workings of WeiDU at all really but I'm starting to think it'll be very much worth my while to do so. Maybe I'll end up contributing here sooner or later.

 

If you don't mind me asking one more stupid question that i forgot to ask: the last thing that bugs me that I'd like to deal with is the portrait selection. I'm not sure what either BioWare or BeamDog were thinking by making portraits of NPCs that are already in the game available to player characters but I would like to replace all of these with my own custom portraits. I know that I can just use custom portraits the normal way so this is not a big deal, more of a convenience thing. My question is, do I also go about editing these in the chitin.key file with WeiDU?

There's a mod that makes her a thief/cleric. The lore fiendly approach is that you make a elf character, and copy the stats .. And if you can't make a Cleric/dual-class you want out of an elf, you won't make her such. Clear ? So no.

Good, now you can make her to be what ever you wish her to be with EEKeeper and cheat as much as you like, 25 in all the stats, but it's the same as making her to be one with 3 in all the stats ... the game doesn't give a darn, how lore fiendly you claim to be.

In 2ed D&D, drows have -1 to Constitution, and +1 to Dexterity, same as regular elves. Just (mostly) evil. And chaotic.

Yeah I'm not going to be giving anyone 25 in any stats. The kind of changes I make are just to improve their class stats. I mean, no one in their right mind would roll a Cleric with 15 Wisdom and 16 Intelligence, that's just stupid. Or a mage with 17 intelligence with a whole bunch of stats to spare in useless things. Even if I was making a character with a limit of say, 75 points, I wouldn't make such stupid decisions. The vanilla NPCs have been created as if a complete beginner who doesn't know the rules and didn't bother to read any descriptions created them. On the one hand, I can understand that BioWare wanted to maybe make them seem 'natural', on the other hand it's just completely dumb. I guess I'll look for a 2E rulebook for more info on Drows. As far as I understand they are basically elves with 50% magic resistance. In other words, better than elves with no other downsides. And that can't be right.

 

Good call on modifying Bif files. i'll look into the WeiDu method but really it's not such a big deal. One hack way to remove those CHR files is to create blank files with the same name in the override folder. It's worked for me so far so I'll just stick to that. Was just curious if there was another way.

 

As for editing Find Familiar, I'm aware of a mod called 'More Style for Mages' that makes a lot of changes to this spell. However, I don't like all of the changes. I guess what I'll do is try to dig through that mod's files for more information on what I want to do. This is the modification I would really like to be able to make out of all.

 

Thanks for the info guys, my questions have been mostly answered.

Description of "Kreso's selection" is this:

 

 

"This selection takes a minimalist approach, enhancing the original game content without adding any new NPCs or large expansions or encounters. The AI is not changed, so the difficulty will be the same as the original game."

 

 

So why then it contains both new NPC's and SCS with difficulty enhanced encounters and Ascension? 

The selections and descriptions definitely need a major overhaul IMO and the only real way to find out exactly what you want and what works for you is to try and try again unfortunately. Start with a preset that looks decent to you and work for there, make sure to regularly use the 'Import Selection to File' option to save your mod selection for next time too. The amount of time it takes to install a mod setup can take a REALLY long time and it's very possible you'll make yourself sick to death of Chapter One of the game while you test out mods but it's worth it once you know exactly what you want. Just one tip while you're testing out what you want and what you don't want, leave out Sword Coast Stratagems until you're sure because it adds about half an hour at least to the time it takes to install all of your mods. If you're plan on using SCS, add it to your mod setup only when you're sure about eveything else.

A lot of threads on this website are from long before BGEE so I hope that it is ok for me to ask a couple of stupid questions here that may or may not have already been asked / answered.

 

1. I've been wanting to modify the Find Familiar spell but I don't seem to be able to find all the neccessary components in NearInfinity or DLTCEP. I know of the CRE files for the familiars, the spell itself (SPL) and the spell effect (EFF). I have a feeling that I'm missing a script or something. What I want to do is make the Find Familiar spell castable by any party member, not just the main protagonist and I want to rearrange the familiars slightly between the alignments eg. Ferret for True Neutral, Rabbit for Lawful Neutral. How would I go about doing this? I'm at a loss here.

 

2. What tools do people use to unpack and repack BIF files? For example, I want to remove all of the CHR files from misc.bif so that when I go to the character import screen, only the characters that I have created will be there without any of these premade characters that I will never use. NearInfinity is able to read BIF archives but the most it seems to be able to do is extract files, not remove them entirely. I haven't seen a tool of this sort mentioned anywhere.

 

3. Seeing as I think that most of the Vanilla NPCs stink as far as stats are concerned, I usually modify the ones that I plan on using throughout the game with slightly better stats so that they're actually useful in their classes. For my next playthrough I'm planning on using Viconia. Is there any information around about the stats and available classes for the Drow race? I know that they are a type of Elf and that they have 50% magic resistance but that's it. This isn't the biggest deal but before I modify her, I would like to know what the lore friendly approach is. For example, I would've liked to make her a Cleric/Mage or Cleric/Thief multiclass but I don't think that's an option for Elves so would it be available for Drows?

Well most people would install a setup and play a complete game so the only people affected by this will be brand new users and people like me that cannot make up their mind about a mod setup. And honestly it's not that difficult to fix and for anyone that has the same problem, a Google search of 'Big World Setup' should bring them to this thread within the first couple of search results where there is now both the cause and the solution in plain English.

 

But I definitely think that until all the kinks are ironed out, there should be an option between stable Weidu and beta Weidu. Maybe the beta should only appear if people have enabled EET in the first place or are modding BG2EE, not BG1EE.

Well I just ran BWS again and WeiDU redownloaded so unless that was it downgrading, it would appear that BWS is in fact updating to these beta versions itself. I didn't test it out, however, I'll just stick to the working exe that I already have for now.

Nice! Up until this point I've just been editing her CRE files post install but this is much better. The only problem with BWS is that the extent of my experience modding this game so far is choosing a bunch of mods from a list and clicking 'continue' until I have nice mod setup haha. Good to see it's such a simple fix and I hope it's fixed in the mod itself too, not too sure which mods are even still alive as far as development goes.

Edit: just for the info, this fix does the charm, just be sure to also add an entry for 'Branwe5'. Branwe and Branwe5 are her only two CRE files and the only two files that are affected, as far as I know.

I hope that this is the right place for this but I have tracked down an error that has been bugging me for a long time now to a component of this mod. Between the components 'Standardize Creature Immunities and Abilities' and 'Standardize Poison Immunity', Branwen is being patched with a huge list of undesirable effects making her almost untouchable in a lot of cases. Levelling her up does not automatically 'fix' anything either. I believe that the reason that this is happening is because Branwen's initial race is 'Statue' and the patcher is reading her CRE file as if she is a non-playable creature in the game.

Thanks for the info, makes sense. I didn't even intentionally install it, BWS did automatically and I wasn't watching the download progress at the time to see what was updating, it probably downloaded in a couple of seconds anyway.

Thanks a million guys. So it's Weidu that obviously just updated yesterday causing this havok. Haven't downgraded it yet but I'll get there soon, it makes sense and I know it'll work. I'm actually of two minds now whether or not to carry on with my current setup or to wait a little while, it seems that interesting things are happening in this modding scene at the moment.

Edit: although of course this means some very popular mods are effectively broken for now for people using BWS trying to mod this game with the latest version of WeiDu. Perhaps for the time being BWS could offer two versions of WeiDu? Why the change anyway? It seems like a kind of arbitrary thing to change, especially if that means that a whole bunch of mods need to change now too.

Edit2: worked like a charm and for anyone else that faces the same issue and comes here for answers, here is the direct link to the version of WeiDU that works with these mods at the moment: http://www.weidu.org...Windows-239.zip

I'm not using EET (unless you mean EET Tweaks) and I don't think it's even implemented in BWS yet. I've had 99% the same setup for BG1EE for months now and have just been tweaking options here and there. I don't understand how I can suddenly have compatibility issues with multiple mods that's I've been using for months up until yesterday.

That's good to know. It's not something I've tested extensively, I'm finding this game to have the most time consuming modding process out of anything else I've ever modded and I honestly don't have the energy to try all the combinations when I can simply edit his cre file if I want. But the fact that kits work retroactively puts my mind at ease about a few things, so thanks. I honestly don't know how the people who work on these massive projects even have the patience because I barely have the patience just going through the setup process lol, especially when you want to just change one small thing. I suppose leaving Ajantis unmodified is good for compatibility but I'll stick to editing him after the fact.

I'm not sure about the immunity to disease effect but 'Cure Disease' is a level one Paladin innate ability with this tweak. And unless I'm mistaken, Ajantis leveling up to anything but level one wouldn't give him this ability. He might get it later on depending on if the kit gets extra uses at higher levels but he will miss out on gaining a use of it at level one. In other words, if I edited his CRE file to be at level zero, upon leveling up he should get the ability but then I might as well just keep doing what I've been doing and add the right attributes manually. Unless I'm completely wrong?

This led to a new error:

"ERROR: Failure("resource [%tutu_scripth%IGHHEDG.sto] not found for 'COPY'")
Thalantyr - Item Upgrade (Thalantyr Item Upgrade) was not installed due to errors.

I have always had this mod in my load order and have never had this issue with SOD unaware mods before, in fact my last succussful installation including Thalantyr Item Upgrade was yesterday some time. All I did was change one component from another mod and since then I have had this issue. If I skip it, the next mod to get the same error is 'BG1 NPC Project'. And further down the line 'BG1 Unfinished Business' complains about TotSC not being installed. I am sure that I would get a bunch more if I continued but I don't think its all these mods that are the problem here. I've tried with both my own mod selection and the recommended selection and still get the same errors. I've tried freshly installing the game (even though I always have a backup anyway), I've also tried a complete fresh BiG World Setup folder and nothing has helped. I'll attach my latest install log where I went as far as BG1 Unfinished Business and the install log from using the recommended selection, if that helps at all.

OS: Windows 7 / Windows 10 / Wine / Really doesn't matter. Game: BGEE.

It seems a pity to have to make a whole new thread just for this small issue and I find it strange that this doesn't seem to have been mentioned anywhere here even once. The 'Restore innate disease immunity to Paladins' component of this mod works great if you're a player charater, however Ajantis is completely unnaffected and lacks the disease immunity as well as the revised innate abilities. It's a small issue that I've been fixing myself up until this point but now that I'm registered on these forums I thought I'd give it a mention here. Is this a known issue with a good reason why Ajantis, the only party-joinable Paladin NPC is unaffected? Or is this perhaps something that belongs in the realm of the BiG World Fixpack? Otherwise, thanks for this great mod, it wouldn't be the same without it.

My game is BGEE. So I decided to change something small in my mod setup last night, deleted my mod folder and fired up BiG World Setup to start again. I noticed here that something in the program updated. So I altered the one component that I wanted to change and went ahead to the install. Everything checks out fine, everything downloads fine. In the install process the mod 'Thalantyr Item Upgrade', which has always been the first mod to install after the fixpack in my setup will no longer install with this error: "Please install on BG:TotSC, BGT, EET, BG:EE, or Tutu." I tried a million different things thinking I'd screwed up something, even did a complete fresh install of BGEE but nothing helps. Skipping this causes another mod not so far down the line to give me the exact same error so it seems something is royally screwed here. I noticed another update this morning but the situation still hasn't changed. I've attached my install debug file but it wont tell you anything I haven't already. And P.S. seeing as this is my first post here, thank you so much for this awesome work that you are doing here to make modding this game as painfree as possible, you are doing a great thing here.