Quick but complicated question: Exactly what things can change your checksum?

[Narlepoax III]

Hi all. I've been enjoying the new DLC with a friend. We've been playing a multiplayer game for a few days, but suddenly his checksum changed for no apparent reason, and now we can't play together any more.

We have exactly the same mods.
We have exactly the same load order.
Neither of us are in debug mode.

I genuinely don't know what else could have caused this issue. We had the same checksum at the start of the day. We both rearranged our mods to do some testing, and when we put our mods back to the way they were, we each had a different checksum.

Anyone able to shed some light on the issue?

EDIT: To clarify, I don't know what the checksum was before we did the mod test shuffle, so I don't know who's got the borked checksum. Could be both of us, for all I know.

 

[gigau]

to the Tech Support subforum.

 

[AndrewT]

First check you can play MP with no mods at all enabled. If not one of you has a corrupted game installation.

If you can play like that though, then both enable ONE mod, and test. If that works, enable another and test ... that way you'll quickly pin down the problem mod.

 

[prismaticmarcus]

but how are checksums calculated?

 

[Narlepoax III]

First check you can play MP with no mods at all enabled. If not one of you has a corrupted game installation.

If you can play like that though, then both enable ONE mod, and test. If that works, enable another and test ... that way you'll quickly pin down the problem mod.

I did try disabling all mods. We had the same checksum, but we didn't try to connect on vanilla.

I've done a full, clean reinstall of my game and all mods. Went through all my game files and manually deleted every remnant of the game and mods except my saves. Still had the same checksum when I was done reinstalling.

But I'm mostly trying to figure out what could have caused this issue so I can fix it myself if it happens again in the future.

 

[Narlepoax III]

Alright, well...

We've both done reinstalls, and we can connect again now.

Still don't know what broke in the first place, but at least the issue is fixed.

 

[prismaticmarcus]

i'd still like to know how the checksum is calculated

 

[AndrewT]

In the game's Steam folders is a file checksum_manifest.txt