The Dragon Age Toolset: Destroyer of Worlds.

It is possible that I have just become a lot more stupid than I used to be, but try as I might, I couldn’t get Dragon Age’s editor to do ANYTHING without something going horribly wrong. Even though I’d not even changed anything, I somehow managed to break the main campaign and corrupt my saves. Weirdness abounded, with my party just standing about, refusing to follow me, and greeting me as if we were meeting for the first time. Talking to my dog (Chompy) teleported me below the ground. All around there was misery and gnashing of teeth.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one, and there was actually quite a good reason. The toolset’s database is mismatched with that of the live game, so without jumping through a few hoops it’s very hard to make a mod that isn’t going to be having some issues. As I am a very strong believer in not releasing buggy mods, I have decided not to make any until the toolset is patched sometime next week. Sorting out my own bugs is one thing, but I need to be able to trust the toolset to not be throwing in some extra ones. Modding is hard enough without faulty tools.

If you’ve found your game is broken after trying out the toolset you may be able to get things working again by following these instructions. They worked for me at least.

How to fix Dragon Age if the Toolset broke it.

1. Open up the toolset. Go into File, Manage Modules, and create a new module. Don’t ever open up the Single Player module again, as just opening it is enough for it to start writing files and causing trouble. As the toolset automatically loads up the last module it had, and the Single Player one was it’s default, that’s why just opening the toolset was enough to break things. With another module loaded now, you should be safe from that issue going forward.

2. In the Tools menu in the toolset select “Empty Export Directories”.

3. Go into your My Documents/Bioware/Dragon Age/Modules folder and rename the Single Player folder.

With any luck Dragon Age is now fixed and your regular campaign game will now be working properly, though any save games you made while you had mismatched data will still be messed up. Hopefully you have a recent save from before that happened!

I’m looking forward, once the toolset is fixed, to making a few modules of my own. We’ll see how that goes.

2 comments to The Dragon Age Toolset: Destroyer of Worlds.