BG2EE Mod install order

Comments

• barker262 Member Posts: 75

  July 2022

  Great job keeping that jenga tower stable. I'm here because I was thinking of adding another mod which I think has reached maturity - G3's Spell Revisions. My question is two fold; how do you install it (no information in the readme or Github documents) and secondly why do you have it installed twice?

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• shevy123456 Member Posts: 178

  February 9 edited February 9

  In lieu and spirit of mr_planescapist's showing his mod installation order
  from about two years ago, here is the one I am using for my current run-through
  in 2024. My next run-through will happen some time in the middle of 2024 or so,
  probably exploring the shaman (for Lava's mod) and bard theme overall (in general,
  as I used to hate bards, but the bard mod looks interesting).
  
  So, first, the list I am currently using (I am using a few other mods; and often
  I found that Lava's mods work very well, so I tend to install them first if
  possible):
  
  - Unfinished_Business # 01
  - Tales_of_the_Deep_Gardens # 02
  - The_White_Queen # 03
  - The_Ooze_Lounge # 04
  - BridgesBlock # 05
  - Alabaster_Sands # 06
  - The_Sellswords # 07
  - Eilistraee # 08
  - Trials_of_the_Luremaster_mod # 09
  - Tangled_Oak_Isle # 10
  - The_journey_to_the_Whin_Hill # 11
  - Tower_of_Deception # 12
  - Assassinations # 13
  - willowisp # 14
  - The_Luxley_Family-v2.0.0 # 15
  - Every_mod_and_dog # 16
  - Mystigan # 17
  - NeverwinterNights-0.94 # 18
  - Back_to_Brynnlaw # 19
  - TestYourMettle-v1.4 # 20
  - The_Dreadful_Tales_In_Love_Undeath # 21
  - The_Dreadful_Tales_Juniper_and_the_Stone_Leech # 22
  - DAWAP-v5 # 23
  - Southern_Edge # 24
  - BloodiedStingsOfBarovia # 25
  - Romantic_Encounters # 26
  - Dvaradime # 27
  - Innershade # 28
  - Pai-Na-NPC-mod-for-BG2-EE-1.8a # 29
  - One_Item_Mod_to_Rule_them_All # 30 # this is actually rebranded from Unofficial_Item_Pack, but I haven't yet modified it that much; the long term goal is to bundle all useful items into a single mod
  - ItemUpgrade # 31
  - Reunion_mod # 32
  - Made_in_Heaven_mod # 33
  - Ascalons-questpack # 34
  - Quest_Pack # 35
  - forgotten-armament-v4.0 # 36
  - Fishing_for_Trouble # 37
  - Homeward_Bound # 38
  - ruad-rofhessa-item-upgrade-v29.4.0 # 39
  - Heroes_Thieves_and_Moneylenders # 40
  - heart_of_the_wood # 41, an item
  - I_Shall_Never_Forget # 42, by Lava
  - saradas-magic-for-BG2 # 43, a new NPC
  - NPC-Dusk-MOD-v1.5.0-13.12.2023 # 44, may be better to install it fairly late.
  - tactics-remix-v0.6.2 # 45
  - wheels # 46, Wheels of Prophecy
  - Tweaks_Anthology # 47
  - Skip_Chateau_Irenicus # 48; should come late
  
  (The above may not appear evenly spaced; I use a mono-spaced font in my editor for my
  local text files. Not sure how this may look on the webforum or how to make use of a
  mono-spaced font for the above. Anyway.)
  
  Some words to the above.
  
  So far I have no problem with the above; only one bug, which is the mage dagger bug from
  the planar sphere, where I get tons of more spells - not sure why, but I can reproduce this
  reliably now.
  
  What is important to say is that the above is on a CLEAN install. I know that if I install another
  mod now, after having started a game, and weidu wants to re-install things (or I upgrade it),
  then all sorts of strange problems will occur, e. g. string descriptions that show up in place
  of other strings. This is not solely the fault of weidu alone, as I understand it, because I
  assume one or two of the above mods make changes that are incompatible with weidu (or
  weidu does not detect that this then leads to problems), but for whatever the reason, the
  weidu feature of reinstalling everything does not work for me at all. I try to avoid it these
  days, and, lo and behold, finally things seem to work really well (so far).
  
  Why is skip chateau coming last? For some reason when I invoke weidu.exe, it tries to
  update things, but then it hangs on skip chateau (and also one or two more mods). I
  am not sure as to why that is so, other mods don't show this problem, so I suspect that
  something isn't working 100% with skip chateau. But I only need it to skip the first
  dungeon anyway; after that I can play the game (after having done the first dungeon
  for like 100 times, I really need to be able to skip it).
  
  Some more about old mods: although many old mods were adapted or adjusted for
  BG2EE, from my experience these old mods have tons of problems, often more subtle
  ones, sometimes interesting ones such as the messenger that crashes the game (but
  you can snipe him off via the timestop item, as someone else pointed out on the
  webforum - that was a useful hint, but these days I simply avoid mods that have
  such bugs). Many of the old mods contain interesting things. For instance, the Drizzt
  mod, I love the arena, but it had several bugs, and the overall mod is also buggy (at
  the least it was to me). But the idea of an arena was great. So perhaps someone can
  take useful things from other mods and put them into a new, improved mod, such
  as the lichdom mod. The only problem I had with the latter one was that I needed to
  install yet another mod to be able to play lichdom right now, and I can only do so
  for a completely new run, because I know weidu will create problems otherwise
  again when it tries to reinstall things.
  
  I also rarely install NPC mods, unless the NPCs are of a fairly high quality (but often
  I skip them). For instance, Dusk NPC mod is great; Lava's Dwaradime is also very
  good; Skitia's NPCs also are storyline-centric (though a few of them I feel are a
  bit too underpowered, or respectively other NPC mods are a bit too overpowered,
  depends on how you want to view it). By and large, though, I found that NPC mods
  often cause more problems than one would assume to be there; I am not sure
  why, but I found NPC mods often problematic. But there is a practical reason too:
  if I have to manually install something then I prefer to bundle it into as few
  manual steps as possible. This is why I'd love NPC mods to be bundled together,
  e. g. to install several NPCs (Skitia's mod does that).
  
  As for the installation steps: I tend to always say "yes" when I want to view the
  README (I found that this is better than saying no, some mods stopped at once
  after I hit no there), I also worked through slowly. cmd.exe seems to have some
  problems if you work too quickly. I also waited until a mod was installed
  completely - I noticed that when a mod begins to be updated by weidu.exe,
  if I copy a new mod to the same base directory, weidu.exe instantly picks it
  up and wants to do things, which probably may cause issues. So I stopped doing
  that, and it seems that if you install things more slowly, in the long term you also
  have fewer issues that way.
  
  I am also testing the recent tactics remix mod again (save for any changes to
  dragons or irenicus in general; tactics remix is not the only one there). The old
  issue of tactics remix interfering with Dusk NPC is no longer an issue because
  Dusk's allies were moved to another location, and that works actually better
  overall (plus they got their own area now - perhaps even a cellar with
  treasure one day!). So tactics remix can be recommended for more experienced
  players looking for challenges, but it's still hard in certain situations; Kangaxx
  took me a few more tries until I figured out a reliable routine. The fight where
  you get the staff of magi is still pretty hard. Anyway - hopefully that can be of
  help for those who struggle with installation orders in general. Probably many
  more mods can be installed that work fine; maybe one day we have some
  kind of reliable auto-installer that can skip manual installation completely
  (for instance, something like "ensure english is used"; I sometimes mis-install
  and then suddenly have russian symbols, sometimes because some mods
  don't assign 0 as english, but instead another number, and I am too quickly
  typing to correct that, or notice only at a later time.)
  

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