GustavDev Error when trying to join friends

[Lunatic Zorr]

I'm on Mac. My friends on Windows.
I've been trying to play with friends for weeks and week now, and every time we try, either them joining me or me joining them, we get thrown back to the menu and and error about some "GustavDev" mod. We have uninstalled the game, and reinstalled it. We have no mods or anything that changes the game installed. Why are we getting this error?
How can we fix this?
Our game versions are the same: 4.1.1.4494476

[アンジェル]

Originally posted by Lunatic Zorr:

GustavDev Error when trying to join friends
I'm on Mac. My friends on Windows.
I've been trying to play with friends for weeks and week now, and every time we try, either them joining me or me joining them, we get thrown back to the menu and and error about some "GustavDev" mod. We have uninstalled the game, and reinstalled it. We have no mods or anything that changes the game installed. Why are we getting this error?
How can we fix this?
Our game versions are the same: 4.1.1.4494476

After seeing so many of these cases I am almost certain you are lying about not using mods.
So best you can do, what you should have done in the first place to begin with, is sharing screenshots to compare the game files if you do not want to use the launcher's analysis tool.

It is impossible to have that issue if you did a proper reinstall of the game, using a specialised tool to remove it traceless from PC/Mac.

[Lani]

This sounds like an issue where someone used to have mods, removed them and assumed that would be it. Reasonable but unfortunately often not the case.

Try this on the PC side:

Originally posted by Larian support:

If you are currently using mods or have used them previously, they may be what is causing this issue. It’s best to double check that all mod files are completely removed. To do so, check the 'Mods' and 'Public' folders in the '..\SteamApps\common\Baldurs Gate 3\Data' folder, etc; and if present, both folders are safe to delete. If applicable, you can also delete the modsettings.lsx file in the profile folder.

You are also going to need to check the local AppData folder for the current user account: '..\SteamApps\common\Baldurs Gate 3\Data' as any old mod files may have been copied over to there. To do this, copy the following line into the location bar in Explorer and hit Enter: %LocalAppData%\Larian Studios\Baldur's Gate 3\Mods
Delete any files you find there

I'm not entirely sure where the equivalent folders would be on Mac, but I recommend trying to find them there as well if mods were used on the Mac at any point.

Why does reinstalling the game not help with this kind of issues?
The mods are stored in- and are considered part of user configuration, areas which are left alone during uninstalls most of the time. So that if you re-install something all your personalized settings and such are still there and you don't have to reconfigure everything again. User smoothness that bites with troubleshooting.
I wish Uninstall Dialogues would offer quick and thorough uninstalls to people.

[Lani]

Originally posted by アンジェル:

After seeing so many of these cases I am almost certain you are lying about not using mods.
So best you can do, what you should have done in the first place to begin with, is sharing screenshots to compare the game files if you do not want to use the launcher's analysis tool.

It is impossible to have that issue if you did a proper reinstall of the game, using a specialised tool to remove it traceless from PC/Mac.

A bit adversarial there Angelfish.
The tech-support version of a familiar quote goes: Don't assume malice where lack of technical experience will do.

I.e. It's more likely they are mistaken about not having mods than that they're outright lying about it. Also, yes we've seen so many of these issues, but for the people on the other end it's usually just them, a quick Google search, if that. and the a post here.

[Lunatic Zorr]

Originally posted by アンジェル:

After seeing so many of these cases I am almost certain you are lying about not using mods.
So best you can do, what you should have done in the first place to begin with, is sharing screenshots to compare the game files if you do not want to use the launcher's analysis tool.

It is impossible to have that issue if you did a proper reinstall of the game, using a specialised tool to remove it traceless from PC/Mac.

Super helpful to just assume that I'm lying. Makes live so much easier. There's a quote that goes (just change "nice" with "useful").

Originally posted by Someone Nice:

If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all.

---

Originally posted by Lani:

This sounds like an issue where someone used to have mods, removed them and assumed that would be it. Reasonable but unfortunately often not the case.

Try this on the PC side:

Originally posted by Larian support:

If you are currently using mods or have used them previously, they may be what is causing this issue. It’s best to double check that all mod files are completely removed. To do so, check the 'Mods' and 'Public' folders in the '..\SteamApps\common\Baldurs Gate 3\Data' folder, etc; and if present, both folders are safe to delete. If applicable, you can also delete the modsettings.lsx file in the profile folder.

You are also going to need to check the local AppData folder for the current user account: '..\SteamApps\common\Baldurs Gate 3\Data' as any old mod files may have been copied over to there. To do this, copy the following line into the location bar in Explorer and hit Enter: %LocalAppData%\Larian Studios\Baldur's Gate 3\Mods
Delete any files you find there

I'm not entirely sure where the equivalent folders would be on Mac, but I recommend trying to find them there as well if mods were used on the Mac at any point.

Why does reinstalling the game not help with this kind of issues?
The mods are stored in- and are considered part of user configuration, areas which are left alone during uninstalls most of the time. So that if you re-install something all your personalized settings and such are still there and you don't have to reconfigure everything again. User smoothness that bites with troubleshooting.
I wish Uninstall Dialogues would offer quick and thorough uninstalls to people.

Thanks for this. The equivalent folders in Mac are the following:
For `%LocalAppData%\Larian Studios\Baldur's Gate 3\`:

/Users/Username/Documents/Larian Studios/Baldur's Gate 3/

For `..\SteamApps\common\Baldurs Gate 3/`

/Users/Username/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/Baldur's Gate 3/ Contents

When I reinstalled, I did go through and deleted every reference to the game in both main folders. I didn't even keep the savegames since they're synced to the cloud.

My `modsettings.lsx` file has the following contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<save>
    <version major="4" minor="5" revision="0" build="600"/>
    <region id="ModuleSettings">
        <node id="root">
            <children>
                <node id="ModOrder"/>
                <node id="Mods">
                    <children>
                        <node id="ModuleShortDesc">
                            <attribute id="Folder" type="LSString" value="GustavDev"/>
                            <attribute id="MD5" type="LSString" value=""/>
                            <attribute id="Name" type="LSString" value="GustavDev"/>
                            <attribute id="UUID" type="FixedString" value="28ac9ce2-2aba-8cda-b3b5-6e922f71b6b8"/>
                            <attribute id="Version64" type="int64" value="36028797018963968"/>
                        </node>
                    </children>
                </node>
            </children>
        </node>
    </region>
</save>

Which when checking online seems to be the default (`Gustav` is the equivalent of the whole game, based on this BG3 Wiki: https://bg3.wiki/wiki/Modding:Installing_mods#Example_Modsettings_File).

---

Originally posted by Lani:

A bit adversarial there Angelfish.
The tech-support version of a familiar quote goes: Don't assume malice where lack of technical experience will do.

I.e. It's more likely they are mistaken about not having mods than that they're outright lying about it. Also, yes we've seen so many of these issues, but for the people on the other end it's usually just them, a quick Google search, if that. and the a post here.

Thanks.

I'm certain I'm not mistaken about not using any mods.
I've never installed any mod for this game, and I've followed all the recommended steps to remove all files related to the game after uninstalling it.
I mainly avoid mods for this game for the sole reason that using them on Mac seems to just be more complicated and honestly not worth all the trouble.

The only other explanation I can think of is that since it complains about `GustavDev` being different versions, and the wiki I mentioned above stating that `Gustav` is the whole game, that even though my friends and I have the same game version (4.1.1.4494476), some component of our games does not share the same version for some reason. That maybe something was missed in the Hotfix #17 that was applied to Mac on the 26th of Jan.