This is a cautionary tale about making sure you manage your data.

I enjoy modding simple things to tweak little things. This story revovles around my attempt at slug weights for mechs allowing you to 'fill out' that last little fraction of weight to prevent that 'underweight' warning EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU FIELD THAT MECH....

My first attempt was made, and rather than go through the hassle to travel to a new system to find the new items, I loaded the Skirmish mode, made a custom lance, and made custom mechs for it. To my horror, my calculations were off. I killed the game and started tweaking. Somewhere along the way I discovered my error was more general than a slight error in math. So I deleted the first attempt and armed with the new found knowledge of the mechanics, I rebuilt my slug weights from scratch and used a different naming schema. This proved to be a bad mistake.

I try to fire up BattleTech and I get caught in the infinite loading screen. After several hours of trying to fix this, I removed the game completely, and downloaded a fresh copy, installed ModTek and tried again.... AND STILL HAD THE INFINITE LOADS.... So I started digging into the only logging file that might have answers... //BATTLETECH/BattleTech_Data/output_log.txt and there is was. The system was looking for gear_IDs associated with my first failed mod.

But how? I nuked the install from orbit just to be sure... It came down to a feature I don't normally use, nor particually like, GoG-Galaxy Cloud Saves.... But Wait! I removed everything! Wrong! Cloud Saves preserves custom Mechs and Lances in Skirmish Mode, but not with other saves. This lead to the system seeing a reference to a gear_ID tag to a piece of equipment it didn't have in its files and kept looking for it.

I had typed out all of this on a message to this very forum begging for help when it hit me. If I restore the missing gear_ID tags to items (even clones of other things) I can get past the infinite load and into skirmish mode to delete the custom mechs and lance to excise the problem... And a reinstall that didn't actually help wasn't really needed.

It worked. I am able to play again. So I thought I'd share my experiances so that others might learn one of the most basic of programming lessons. If you do something and it doesn't work, remember to undo it before starting something new to fix the problem.

TL:DR - Skirmish Mode custom Mechs and Lances are stored in Cloud Saves, but not where your Campaign saves are. Also, if you add custom items via a Mod, you must remove all references to them before removing the item's JSON file.

I hope my little adventure helps someone else out there.

So the tldr is, turn off cloud saves.

That's certainly a valid takeaway.

I also think that one of the oldest rules about Computers applies too. If you change something and the system breaks, change it back before trying anything else.