Basic guide for MW5 disconnects in multiplayer using mods

This is a small guide for connectivity issues revolving around mods it will discuss disconnects of failed connections from CTD's or return to title screen drops, blatant failures to connect, or several minute connections that result in a disconnect.

The scope of this guide is for potential assistance, and is not intended as a panacea for these issues, but a base guide on what MIGHT be causing a connectivity issue, and something to try when you're not sure what's wrong.

I make no promises, nor assurances, but I hope this helps if you're stuck.

Disclaimer

First of all. I'm not an expert, I'm decent with troubleshooting, but the guys over at the YAML Discord helped me, and should get like 120% of the credit here. But this is obscure, I do think it'll happen more as this game ages however, so I think it's a good idea to at least get it out there. So, I'm probably not totally correct, and even if I am totally correct in what I'm saying, there's no guarantee what I'm saying will remain accurate indefinitely.

Second, I'm not PGI support, I'm not monitoring this, nor am I volunteering for jobs to help with your connectivity issues, I'm just sharing what worked for us with a huge mod load order and a few basic steps to take to try to get that resolved. I'm not responsible for your game exploding, and I'm not responsible to help you if you screw it up. I make no promises any of these steps will work. As before, look to the comments for anything messed up, or communication on additional things you can try or something similar. And for the people who didn't read these two disclaimers, because it's inevitable.

Now, the guide. If you're here and you didn't read the disclaimer above, do. If you did, on to step 1.

Are you running mods?

If not, this guide's liable to do absolutely nothing for you. Sorry. It's pretty likely using vanilla settings you should not have much issue with connectivity that can't be resolved with conventional means outside of messing with the mod folder, since um... you won't have one and if you do, it'll be empty. That's outside the scope of this guide. I hope you can get your issue fixed, I just can't help here. The guide is for disconnects either on connection, or during missions.

Sudden CTD's or Return to tiles while in a game:

Connectivity between two people for a reasonable amount of mods can be messed up by versions.

Verify that your mod list (Title Screen) are the same between the host (the person inviting to the game) and the client (The person joining the game).

I feel compelled to state that not all mods MUST be identical on the two games for a connection to
be established, but those mods that don't cause issues tend to be audio, or visually based.
Something like a inner sphere map replacer, or custom music, should not cause issues. Again, it COULD but
it's far less likely, since those mods aren't going to cause the client to reference something that
doesn't exist.

Put simply, mods add stuff to the game, and if the files for something aren't referenced don't go anywhere, the program tends to crash, or quit what it's doing. If you're missing a library of some kind, either self contained by a mod, or dependent library such as a CAB, when the client tries to load a speific non vanilla item referenced in the mod, or the dependent library, it fails, and usually either crashes the game entirely, or dumps the connection to the host.

If you suddenly drop from a mission, or various mechs start acting really strangely like not walking while their model moves around the map, or quickly teleporting like fight scenes in DBZ. It might not be lag, it very well could be, but you're likely missing something the host has, and it's usually a weapon or a mech mod using custom assets.

If you crash before the mission starts but you were fine in the mechbay, it could be a mech or weapon mod, but at that point it's possibly map related as well. Head to the title screen, or the mods screen and walk down the list of mods they the host have installed. Anything that effects missions, mechs, or weapon generation, is usually good to replicate to avoid these problems.

Load Order

Mechwarrior 5 mods all have a load order.

I've seen my own positive, negative, in the hundreds, So you can check those load orders in the handy title screen menu once you've loaded mods. Sometimes, some mods overwrite other mods (They conflict).

Generally speaking, the mod loaded first is overwritten by the mod loaded later. This can be an issue, though I have it far less now than initially. The issue would be that the client has a different load order and something different on the host machine is in that overlap, and the discrepancy causes an issue. Generally this manifests as things having incorrect values though. For instance similarly names assets might have weird hardpoints for the client or host, but look fine to the other person. Generally, this is mod order issue, and they often do not cause connectivity issues, but they might.

You can get a MW5 load order program to easily set the order. It's also really nice because you can enable mods within that app, as opposed to opening and loading the game, setting mods, then reloading after closing it out. Saves time. As of this posting the MW5 LOM V2 is the current one I'm using, and it's on Nexus Mods. I've used Vortex, and while I like it for Fallout, not so much for this game. Personal preference though. You can also manually change the load order in the mod.json file inside of the mod folder you're putting in the "mods" folder in the installation location the value usually looks like this: ""defaultLoadOrder": X.X," where X.X is the number with decimal you want the load order to be. Relative to other mods, you may want it early or late.

Honestly, unless you're really having playability issues, it's pretty smart to leave these alone, but once you're at high mod counts, you might need to play with them. I would just write down the default value as a practice, or make a back up.

Client: Black Screen | Host gets connection, client player disconnects after a time.

The Discord server at YAML helped here and this guide wouldn't be possible without them.

Essentially what might be going on is there's too many mods in your list. Mods like Yet Another Clan Invasion, YAML, "Yet another-" Anything really have a lot of changes and assets. The game client is configured to try to connect for 120 seconds. Problem is, you might have more to load than can fit in 120 seconds. So, you might be waiting on assets and files to sync and load because you have a lot of modifications, and after 2 minutes, the game assumes the client has timed out and terminates the connection. Thankfully you can edit this.

To do this, navigate to:
"C:\Users\(your windows profile username here)\AppData\Local\MW5Mercs\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor" And locate the "Engine.ini" file.

Make a backup of this file. Store it wherever you want, but make a backup.

Did you make a backup? Make a backup.

Okay. we're going to be adding several values to this .ini file.
The file will look like this:

[Core.System]
Paths=../../../Engine/Content
Paths=%GAMEDIR%Content
Paths=../../../MW5Mercs/Plugins/MWShaders/Content
... (Continues)
I'm just saying this for verification we're working on the correct file. At the end, put a full carriage return line (You don't need to but it makes it way easier to read if you do) between the end of the last "paths=..." line, and add the following into the .ini file.

[/script/engine.player]
ConfiguredInternetSpeed=120000
ConfiguredLanSpeed=130000

[/script/onlinesubsystemutils.ipnetdriver]
MaxClientRate=120000
MaxInternetClientRate=120000
InitialConnectTimeout=360.0
ConnectionTimeout=360.0

[/script/socketsubsystemepic.epicnetdriver]
MaxClientRate=120000
MaxInternetClientRate=120000
InitialConnectTimeout=360.0
ConnectionTimeout=360.0

[/script/engine.netdriver]
ConnectionTimeout=360.0
InitialConnectTimeout=360.0

(***Note: Don't add anything I didn't put here, copy / paste as is above. You do not need to modify the above excerpt in any fashion, just put what's up there directly into the file where stated, save and exit.)

This changes the engine's Timeouts for connectivity, essentially how long the host or client tries to establish a connection. Up front admission, I don't mess with Unreal too much. These settings make sense because I understand largely what's going on, and I'm not playing with these numbers but I'm no UE4 expert by any means. Messing with this stuff can cause potentially unwanted behavior so just understand that changing values might cause problems.

This is six minutes in those contexts. Anything in the hundreds on the above is seconds. for instance "InitialConnectTimeout=360.0" would be 6 minutes. What this does is it sets the timeout (auto termination) of a connection to 6 minutes and rejects the incoming connection if it doesn't respond meaningfully in 6 minutes.

The timeouts can be increased to your need.

I'm crediting a Discord User by the Name "Butch2k" which can be changed any time, but if you see this and you want it removed for whatever reason, send me a DM and we can discuss it.

Conclusion

I may add more if I have more problems, but thus far this is pretty much the max lengths I've had to go to, but if the comments section gets fairly populated, I'll potentially add to the guide.

Still, People took out parts of their day to help myself and a friend, and I'm paying that forward by hopefully allowing some exposure on this issue.

If my guide was helpful, great, no thanks needed, but is appreciated. If you have more tips, a comment may help someone else. If you have a critique, keep it civil.

I reiterate I make no promises, and I wish you luck in connecting with your friends if this guide should not help.

[Ishiryo]

The script did not work for me. I still lose connection as soon as we deploy to a mission.

[Marcel]

specifically the "Client: Black Screen | Host gets connection, client player disconnects after a time."

[Marcel]

so i have a question, does the whole lance need these settings or just the host?

[combativeThinker]

Thanks.

[Basilisk222]

Before you read on, if you copy the following exactly and completely replace the Engine.ini's contents, it won't work, so don't do that. Please don't. I'm only showing people where the new info goes. The File contains for me, paths to some mod info, so I think it's pseudo unique. See the structure below of what your file should look like once you've copied in the new info from the guide.

_____________________________________

[Core.System]
Paths=../../../XXXXXX/XXXXXX
^ Many more of these v...
Paths=../../../XXXXXX/XXXXXX


[/script/engine.player]
ConfiguredInternetSpeed=120000
ConfiguredLanSpeed=130000

[/script/onlinesubsystemutils.ipnetdriver]
MaxClientRate=120000
MaxInternetClientRate=120000
InitialConnectTimeout=360.0
ConnectionTimeout=360.0

[/script/socketsubsystemepic.epicnetdriver]
MaxClientRate=120000
MaxInternetClientRate=120000
InitialConnectTimeout=360.0
ConnectionTimeout=360.0

[/script/engine.netdriver]
ConnectionTimeout=360.0
InitialConnectTimeout=360.0

[Basilisk222]

SirFlutterNutz, Not in my Experience, no. Non connectivity always gets you absolutely nothing from the host.

[combativeThinker]

Can you copy/paste your engine.ini file here in the comments so we can see exactly where you added your values?

[SirFlutternutz]

Could the connection timeout also be displayed as the player seemingly successfully connecting to the host and being able to move around/see the mechbay for ~30sec and then seeing nothing but stars/space with an unresponsive game?

[Basilisk222]

Tried to make the guide a tad clearer on a specific section I've gotten two questions about.

As far as it still working, it's kind of a niche problem isn't it? I don't know, I've been playing other stuff for a while. I'll get back around to this game eventually. When Larian and Bethesda are done eating my lunch.

DLC drops the 28th, No idea if it'll work past that point. 'Course, most mods will be a smoldering pile of slag after that drop. UE5 is like that. It'll be a few days or weeks before your favorites find their feet again, so you might not even need the guide. Who knows.

[ZachyMan119]

Is this still working? And Bump for what previous person said.