I' am playing Gothic 1 for quite some time now, and for a couple of days I have a really severe problem with it, problem that seem to have no solution other than start all over again.

I' am in chapter 4 and I have to take the Free Mine back with Gorn from Gomez people. The issue is that after I take down the guards from the entrance and go into the mine I found that there are no NPC in it. It is empty.

I checked the internet about this quest and the mine should have Minecrawlers and guards that should try to kill me. The only character in it is the Orc Slave that is asking for a medicine and not so surprisingly the medicine is not in the place were it should be in the mine.

I' am really stuck with all the quests and I do not have a solution. I tried to play again from a previous save slot, meet Xardas, but the same issue appear when I go to the Free mine.

I tried also a reinstall of Gothic and adding the saves as a solution, but the same issue appear.

I had a crash of the game in the mine so I suppose the save is corrupt, but I really do not know to resolve this issue.

Does anybody have a solution or a saves from Chapter 4?

to be honest this is a wild guess but still better than nothing...

choose a save game before you entered the free mine. look up in witch "save slot" it is(the actual save files are numbered from 1 to 15).

now open your gothic installation directory, Saves, savegame$(number). if there is a file named freemine.sav, delete it(maybe you should first du a backup).
if you load that save and enter the freemine the first time it should be initialized from scratch, with all monsters, items...

i had a similar problem with g2(the engine from g2 is the same as from g1, just a little bit updated). i had played through it and later found some old savegame backups which i wanted to play with. so i've put them into the saves folder without first deleting it. what happend was, the backuped saves were from before entering jharkendar the first time so there hadn't been jet addon_world.sav(or something like that) and the addon_world.sav from the saves of my playthrough weren't overwritten. i entered the addon world and everything was allready looted/killed/done...

Thank you for the reply. I manage in resolve the problem by using Kuchenschlachter advice and by going in the underground cave near the Swamp Camp. In the dungeon I deleted all the save and make new one. After these actions the Free Mine is now animated.

Now there is another issue, the guards now can't be killed with the sword, only with the bow. If I use the sword they go down and before I can finish them they are right up. I think this is not a big deal for now and also I' am not sure if it's only in the Free Mine or from now on in the game I have to kill the guards using the bow.

If anyone has a solution or have experienced this type of behavior please advice.

Thank you in advance!

This is actually by design. Melee attacks only knock someone down; to finish him off you need to stand over the body with it highlighted (health bar shown etc.) and press and hold attack. You'll then deliver a finishing move. You can also use a ranged or magic attack as the finisher.

Yes I know that I done that several times. But before the guards were knocked down for several seconds in order to be able to finish them off as you mention.

The issue is that now because of a bug they stand for about 1 second down, and there is not enough time to prepare the finishing move.