ALIEN NATIONS: The 'agriculture' bug
                       by Bev Truter

After sailing through the first 5 missions of the Pimmons, then
getting horribly stuck, I turned my attention to the Amazons and
sailed through missions 1 and 2. But what's this? Shock, horror -
mission 3 has a horrible bug, noticeable very early on in the
game, where you are unable to research agriculture, and therefore
cannot build a farm or provide food for your people. Sob, sigh,
what to do??  I rushed off to visit the JoWooD website/homepage
(www.neo.at OR www.jowood.com), where I discovered from reading
several disgruntled emails on the Readers' Forum that there is a
bug, making mission 3 of the Amazons unfinishable. But the good
news was there's a patch, downloadable from the same site, and
only 850kb too.

Right, download patch, run it, Alien nations now presumably fixed,
and I am all happy again. But horror, horror, now none of my old
saved games will load (which was only to be expected). No worries,
I carefully play my way through mission 3, saving twice, elated
that agriculture bug has now vanished into thin air. Uh-oh. All
goes swimmingly well until I try to load a saved game, and
discover that none of my *new* (post-patch) saved games will load
either.  Sob, scream, mumble. Back to JoWooD site to check out
further disgruntled emails on the FAQ and 'problems' sections of
the site. Yes, some more decidedly cranky emails, bemoaning fact
that *no* saves at all will work, game keeps on crashing. Think,
think, puzzle, ponder.  Aha!  Inspiration!!  First finished
playing entire mission 3 through from scratch, without making any
saves, until I finished it (2.333 hours later). Then embarked on
next cunning plan....

I uninstalled Alien Nations and reinstalled the original game from
the CD-ROM without the patch. However, when I started the game I
noticed that all my post-patch saves were still appearing in the
LOAD section, and that for some odd reason I could now load them.
When I did a search through all my files for those containing the
word 'alien', I noticed that 3 different versions of one
particular Alien Nations file had been scattered about and sent to
3 different sub-sub-folders on C: drive; so in fact I hadn't
managed to completely uninstall Alien Nations as originally
intended. What I'd been aiming for was to delete all traces of the
patch, then cheat my way through the first 3 Amazon missions of
the reinstalled and un-fixed Alien Nations (by typing WINNER for
an instant win, which allows you to begin playing the following
mission in the sequence) until I reached the start of mission 4.
But working on the principle of leave well enough alone if it's
working, I loaded in a saved game from mission 3, typed WINNER,
clicked on mission 4 to start it, and hurriedly saved myself right
at the beginning. Voila! No more problems; not yet, at any rate.









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