First off, hello and thank you to all existing and new subscribers to my music mods! The first month of patch 7 is just about over and it's been busy! My modding time has been quite distracted with trying to get to the bottom of a pretty frustrating issue causing updates to lock in the official BG3 Mod Manager, and while I can't "fix" it on my side (bug report to Larian made), I do finally have some updates on the likely cause and workarounds to suggest.
Update 14th October 2024
I have now replaced virtual textures with standard textures in the latest version of each music mod: Ember's Lute, Haunted Instruments and Celestial Instruments. When Larian are able to fix virtual textures in mods, I may put some of them back to restore the subtle pulsing effect on some of the instrument glowmaps, but for now I decided the benefit virtual textures were offering was not worth the drawbacks or the bugs they were introducing.
I will leave the rest of the article unchanged as the information may still be useful.
Summary
There are two common ways the issues present to users. A file locking error pop up appears when trying to update a mod, or a blue arrow appears next to a mod that doesn't seem to do anything and won't go away. I'll cover both of these in a bit more detail further down in the article. This section is just the key takeaways.
The first locking issue is - I am nearly certain now - caused by mods containing Virtual Textures (though there may be other causes too). If the mod is in the enabled state when BG3 is started, this is what puts the .pak file into a state where it cannot be updated or deleted. I have raised a bug report to Larian, and in the meantime a simple workaround is to Disable the mod, restart BG3, and then Update (or Unsubscribe) to avoid the locking issue.
The second issue with the persistent blue arrow is a little more complex as it can have multiple causes. In the context of these music mods however, it could be a side-effect of the locking issue, where BG3 leaves behind older versions of the .pak file in the Mods folder when it fails to update. The workaround is to Unsubscribe the mods, restart BG3, clear up any left-over old .pak versions in the Mods folder, then restart BG3 and re-subscribe.
n.b. if you experience crashing when starting up BG3, scroll down to the 1st comment on this article.
Symptom: BG3 Throws a Locking Error on Updating or Unsubscribing
Affects: Very likely an issue for any "official" mod that contains Virtual Textures.
Cause Theory: BG3 generating the mod virtual texture cache when starting BG3 with the mod enabled. Please note this is my theory only, and is not confirmed.
BG3 In-Game Mod Manager Workaround Steps:
- Start BG3, go to Mod Manager
- Disable any of the Music Mods in your Installed list. Note Disable only - do not try to Unsubscribe or Uninstall at this point.
- Quit BG3.
- Start BG3 and go back to the Mod Manager.
- You should now be able to Update (or Unsubscribe) the mods without the locking error thrown.
- Re-enable the mods.
Third Party Mod Managers Workaround Steps:
If you are not using the in-game Mod Manager, then you can achieve the same thing by:
- deactivating or disabling the mod in the third party mod manager
- leave the .pak file in the Mods folder - BG3MM will do this by default, though if using Vortex and staging mods, you might need to copy the mod .pak file back from the Staging folder to the Mods folder manually
- start BG3, go to your Save Game, click Update and then Re-enable the mod
Other Notes: the locking issue might be particularly devious in that mod authors can be unaffected by it on their own mods. Again, this is theory only, but I suspect it could be due to the toolkit generating the virtual texture cache. Result is the "works on my PC" effect for the mod author that makes it very hard to spot.
Symptom: Persistent Blue Arrow That Does Nothing
Affects: BG3 mod version is mismatched with the latest version on mod.io.
Cause Theory: less clear to me, but I believe can be caused by "empty" updates on mod.io that increment version, or possibly when mod updates fail and BG3 has multiple versions of a .pak in the Mods folder.
BG3 In-Game Mod Manager Workaround Steps:
- In BG3 Mod Manager, Disable the music mods you have (Ember's Lute, Haunted Instruments, Celestial Instruments). Do not try to update or unsubscribe yet.
- Exit BG3 completely
- Restart BG3
- Now with the mods disabled, you should be able to Unsubscribe them and BG3 will remove them and delete the .pak files in the Mods folder
- Recommend you quit BG3 again at this point and check the Mods folder, in case there's any old versions BG3 left behind - if you find any of the music paks, delete these manually
- Restart BG3
- Resubscribe to the mods in BG3 Mod Manager - this should trigger BG3 to re-download the latest versions
Do this for all 3 of the music mods together (or whichever ones you are using) and that will keep the correct version dependencies between them consistent too.
Third Party Mod Managers Workaround Steps:
I suspect third party mod manager users are unlikely to experience this issue, since these tools will usually flag any integrity issue in the Mods folder to the user. If you have been experiencing crashes after or during a Save game load, try confirming you have the latest version of each mod installed and the dependencies are met.
Thanks For Your Patience!
Apologies if you've been affected, confused or frustrated by the issues! If it is any consolation (probably not lol), I have too!
Depending on how thorny the virtual texture issue may be to resolve, I do have a mod update ready to go on Ember's Lute that replaces them.
I have left comments on this article so you are welcome to ask questions, just be aware that article comments are easier for me to miss so if I don't reply, you can point me to the question on the main mod page comments section.
1 comment
Have been discussing with other mod authors using virtual textures on Discord, with some similarity in the crash reports. A theory is the crashing may also be due to virtual textures in mods, but there's another variable that might mean crashes are only happening for a subset, while for the majority the mod only locks. Unlike the locking, I cannot reproduce the crashing, nor have enough data to update the bug report.
If you have a few minutes to try the following steps and reply here with the outcome, it would help with gathering evidence.
If you answer Yes, yes, yes, or Yes, yes, no to the questions above, could you also share your Operating System, RAM specs, CPU, graphics card and driver version please.