We've touched on it before in several threads, so I figured let's have a thread of its own: How to set up your Oblivion to run multiple games from the same folder. And by multiple games I don't just mean several characters, but completely different mod lists as well.
I currently have three completely different games - different mod lists and different leading characters. I used to run them from two separate Oblivion installations... Yeah, three games, two installations, because actually a lot of mods are the same... and well, I got completely confused. I felt I had to merge them into a single Oblivion installation because a lot of basic utility and quality of life mods are the same everywhere, otherwise Oblivion just doesn't feel right.
I found a way to do it and I would like to share it with you.
As an example, I'll set up a game for Lena Wolf and another one for Hauk. Lena's game is all TWMP. She has Elsweyr, Valenwood, Hammerfell and Skyrim, a bunch of holiday destinations and dungeon suits. Hauk's game is Morroblivion - a completely different set of mods. Yet they both share things like Legion Combat Additions, Bare Necessities, Dynamic Map, Purge Buffers, etc., etc.
Step 1.
Install Oblivion. Install all the mods that you want to use across all of your games. I normally pack BSAs for each mod and remove LOD from existing BSAs so as to avoid surprising conflicts. If different LOD is required for different games, I generate it and pack in a BSA that is loaded with one of the mods in that load order.
Step 2.
Edit Oblivion.ini which is by default located under your user profile - Documents\My Games\Oblivion\Oblivion.ini.
Find setting bUseMyGamesDirectory and set it to 0. Save and exit.
This magical setting tells Oblivion to look for the INI file and the plugin list file in your game installation folder and not somewhere under Documents. So from now on it will look where you have your Oblivion.exe, in my case under E:\Games\GOG\Oblivion.
Step 3.
Copy your Documents\My Games\Oblivion\Oblivion.ini to your game installation folder (see above). This is important because it must have that magical bUseMyGamesDirectory setting set to 0. And of course you want all your other settings preserved as well.
Copy your <User>\AppData\Local\Oblivion\plugins.txt to your game installation folder. From now on Oblivion will look for it there.
Copy or move your Documents\My Games\Oblivion\Saves to your game installation folder.
Copy or move your Documents\My Games\Oblivion\Screenshots to your game installation folder.
Are you feeling how everything starts making sense now?
Step 4.
So here's your single game set up in its own Oblivion installation folder. But we want to have multiple games. Of course it is possible to have all your saves and your screenshots mixed up, but I want them separate, and luckily it's easy to do. So this step is preparation.
Rename your new Oblivion\Saves folder to reflect the name of the character whose saves are in there, for example "Oblivion\Saves - Lena Wolf".
Rename your new Oblivion\Screenshots folder in a similar fashion, for example "Oblivion\Screenshots - Lena Wolf".
Copy or move into your game installation folder your other Saves and Screenshots folders containing data for your other characters, and rename them to reflect it, similar to what I did for Lena Wolf above.
Your Oblivion game installation folder now has several "Saves - ..." folders and several "Screenshots - ..." folders (screenshots are optional, of course).
Step 5.
In this step you create individual INI files.
Your Oblivion.ini is set up for a particular character - you copied it from something! In my example it was the INI file of Lena Wolf. So rename it to reflect the character's name - it becomes "Oblivion-LenaWolf.ini".
Edit Oblivion-LenaWolf.ini:
- Find setting SLocalSavePath and set it to your new saves folder for your character. This just takes the folder name. In my example it is:
What I did is install Wrye Bash and use its profiles. That puts your saves, and the associated load lists, into folders that it manages, and swaps the contents with the active folder when you change profile.
I find Wrye Bash to be a better mod manager than others, as it does a better job of uninstalling mods that have conflicts, such as overwriting the same resource files. You still need to manage load order, but it will notice the tool for that and provide a launch button. You may need to run it on each profile, and have a different order in each.
Versions exist for TES 3, 4, and 5, and I use all of them. I launch the game from it, and the CK/CS, and xEdit.
I've never used this feature, but reading documentation, it appears that it does not manage Oblivion INI files or screenshots, but only plugin lists and save files. It was important to me to also have different INI files per character.
Ghastley - I opened Wrye Bash and I can't find profiles anywhere. It is fairly recent - version 309.2. I found a manual for version 310 which mentions profiles but I don't have any such menu anywhere in my installation. Is it a very recent feature? I am not keen on updating my software every nanosecond, especially if the existing version is working just fine.
No, just a bit hidden. If you right-click the header of the file column on the Saves tab, one option is to select profiles, which produces a list of them, and an option to create a new one. You can select saves and copy or move them to profiles etc.
I can't figure it out... I found the menu item, created two profiles, but I don't have the "Copy to" or "Move to" submenus in the save files menu (according to the extremely short https://wrye-bash.github.io/docs/Wrye%20Bash%20Advanced%20Readme.html#saves-profiles). Also, it does not switch between different mod configurations when I switch profiles. But may be that's because I could not copy any save files into them in the first place... Also, now that I've created these profiles, I cannot see any of my save files at all while before it was showing the correct save files from the folder set in Oblivion.ini.
...this document details those features that were omitted from the aforementioned readme. They are often more specialized, advanced or complicated...
Yeah, you could say that.
I think I'll just stick to my batch files because Wrye Bash doesn't do Oblivion.ini files anyway.
Awesome, this is really cool that you figured this out, Wolf. I do all of this manually, keeping notes on Notepad pages. I like going through and seeing what's going on in each character's game, and making changes accordingly whenever I switch from one to the next. Keeps me in touch; keeps me remembering what's going on (modwise) in each game. Because I have a terrible memory. If I don't keep notes.... that could be hours wasted trying to figure out what the *BLEEP* I did last time I was with somebody.
But yours is a cool way to do it too. Especially changing the .ini line there. How clever. Curious why you don't use https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/38277 though? Not that you should, I certainly never have.
Sure, I get it.
So now I went and broke Lena's game... I am now having stability issues - it crashes about a minute after I start it, so I don't get very far. I reverted to the previous version of Skyrim which is a lot smaller, but it didn't help. So at least it's not Skyrim doing it. I did add a lot of dungeon mods in between - a huge merge, and also a dozen new holiday islands... It is either simply getting overloaded, or there's a killer bug in one of those merges.
So the bottom line is that although Oblivion can handle a lot, it does have its limits.
Which makes it even more important to have those multiple games set up. I am going to strip each game down to the province I'm using, I think you can't have the whole of Tamriel in Oblivion - it's just too big.
Sorry to hear that. Best of luck in resolving the issue. Finding the straw that boke the back can be frustrating. I know, I've been there.
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