[Solved] When do things go wrong with the Fig bug?

[Ninja Steven]

My son did the thing with Hecat then spent a bit of time attacking the dummy then after that, he was unable to bring up the book or the map or even escape to save. We killed the game from the Steam library page and reloaded an autosave which places us in the courtyard and the items were then working but we got to Fig and he did the "What do we have here?" bit and then everything was stuck. Tried reloading a couple of times and no luck. A bit of searching shows this as a known bug with no attempt at a solution but I'm wondering how far we have to roll back to have a hope of avoiding it. Hopefully just before Hecat?

[Ninja Steven]

Just to add a bit more information, The earliest autosave we had was just when we were returning to Hecat after doing her quests. We encountered the same issues so it must be a bit earlier than that. Our earliest save than that was a manual save at Hogsmeade.

The time between when this bug is triggered and when it causes problems apparently is long enough that you could potentially lose any earlier autosave that has a good save and depending how you manage your manual saves, you might not have a good one at all. I would recommend backing up your saves nightly...

[Ninja Steven]

Think I got this solved. It's presumably not the same issue as other people have been having with the fig bug but I'll post my solution anyway in case it provides any clues.

So the lack of menu interaction after Hecat was because my son had not used the fire spell on the dummy. The game did let him run off towards the Fig quest. Somehow, when we quit out using the steam client, when we restarted, it loaded the autosave in the courtyard and while the menus etc now worked, the fig quest was messed up.

We had lost the autosave but I restored the backup and was able to get back to complete Hecat's quest. After firing some fire at the dummy, we were able to proceed to and start the fig quest as designed.

I noticed that some of the other issues reported with the fig quest mentioned it seemed to be a timing issue so maybe it is based around when you shoot fire at the dummy somehow. and whether you quit out of the game (it's a fairly natural stopping point). I'll leave working that out to others though.