Lost DLC access

[Michkov]

I was playing Erik's Korean War mod, when it inevitably crashed once again. Restarting the program resulted in a black screen when selecting the Korean War mod, same thing happens with Squad mod. Going back to the vanilla game I find that I no longer have access to any of the campaigns. All I can do is demo stuff. Which is at odds with what steam tells me since it clearly states I got the two free Pacific campaigns on my account.

So far I've verified the files and steam found a couple of missing ones, but says it fixed that. Apart from a full reinstall I dont know what to do from here. I suspect the mods crash corrupted a file somewhere, but I have no clue where to look.

[bru888]

I keep advising this, I know, but it works a lot of times: Delete your Settings folder and see if that does anything. The game will rebuild it with default settings. There is something in there that sometimes gets corrupted and produces a black screen; rebuilding the folder often solves the problem.

Then, if that did not work, why not do a full reinstall? If you have your DLC keys (or, in your case, Steam remembers them), you shouldn't have to worry about a thing.

[Michkov]

Deleting the settings folder didn't do the trick. Reinstalled the whole game after that, still nothing. Finally figured I might as well restart Steam and lo and behold that did the job. Beats me what happened there, but it's all good now. Thanks bru888

[bru888]

I'm glad. I always feel a bit silly advising the equivalent of the age-old support desk mantra to "reboot" to solve I.T. issues, but it does work many times. In the case of OOB, deleting the Settings folder, followed by a game reinstall, often clears things up. It makes sense; if something is corrupted, a fresh copy of it should resolve the matter. What remains unanswered, though, is what caused the problem in the first place and whether it will recur.

[Michkov]

No worries, there is a reason "have you tried turning it off and on again" is a meme.

With this occurring once in +1000h of logged gametime, it seems to be a rare coincidence of steam and the game interacting in an odd way. Then again, most of the 1000h are in the vanilla game, not the ever crashing Korean mod.