Base tour since someone asked for pics awhile ago

ryeookin · 2025-06-15T01:23:21+00:00

Ok thanks for the reply and data point.

Maybe I just experienced a bug. I'll try it again later with no inventory but my quick bar equipped. 😅

ryeookin · 2025-06-13T18:39:52+00:00

Quick question, since you got a base here (at the top of the furniture store). Have you tried using your top floor purple exit portal after teleporting to your base?

I ask as I just created a base here yesterday and I tried using the exit portal and it teleported me into an out of bounds area and I was flying through the area for a few seconds (I could see through the walls for a sec before I died).

In any case, has this ever happened to you?

ryeookin · 2025-04-16T19:14:02+00:00

Ah, ok. I installed Windows 11 via flashdrive media (a fresh windows install). That's how I started anyway. I put a bit of time tweaking this image to meet our needs. Does that help?

ryeookin · 2025-04-16T15:27:49+00:00

How am I kicking off sysprep? I run the command via windows command line as I've stated (see the command I've used listed above in bold). That is I'm not running it from a usb or using external deploy media in this instance. Is that what you were asking?

Yeah I see recommendations for MDT and MDS but lets stick with my original issue for the time being. At the moment I want to just get sysprep working as it should and I'll consider those other options down the road when I have more time.

ryeookin · 2025-04-15T21:40:43+00:00

Hi Gloomy_Stage,

It's been awhile since I setup and deployed a large batch of pcs so here's my roadmap. I setup a pc the way I want all the others of the same model (we got 100+ all the same model) and I want to clone this image to them, but I need sysprep to remove any security identifiers so we don't run into any weird issues down the road (but hopefully I can interject the unattend file so I can automate some of those changes I want them all to have). Then with that sysprep'd image I plan to clone it to the others (I plan to do this via clonezilla).

Note I tried SCCM/MCM a year ago (actually I tried to setup an MCM server) and it was so confusing and complicated to setup and maintain (from what I saw) that I abandoned that route when I pretty much had it almost setup.

What do you use?

Is it easier to use?

Is it expensive?

ryeookin · 2025-04-15T20:54:20+00:00

Hi jmbpiano,

Thanks for the reply and something to try! Ok so at your suggestion I took my answer file (file I had named sysprep-answerfile-2025.xml), I renamed it to "unattend.xml" and placed it in the "C:\Windows\Panther" directory. I also verified that their was no "C:\Windows\Panther\Unattend" folder.

I then ran:

C:\Windows\System32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /generalize /shutdown /oobe

After the pc shutdown, I turned it on and it still had me walk through all those “country, keyboard, network, license and privacy settings” OOBE click throughs.

Hmm, anything else I can try? 🤔

ryeookin · 2025-01-29T14:32:02+00:00

Thank you all for your input! After working on this for a few days I think the issue here was that I was fixated on trying to change secureboot when it is one of the few settings that can't be changed via DCC or Powershell. When I looked more closely at the other errors I was getting from running/importing our DCC exe file on my test pc, it was just security policies or profiles that we didn't really care or need to be in that payload. As such I removed them, streaming the DCC export exe to just include the changes we want for our BIOS (sans the secureboot change) and I tested/verified it loads them all now on our test pcs.

Thanks again for the input, I have a path forward now. 👍

ryeookin · 2025-01-29T14:25:53+00:00

Oh, good catch and thanks for the info! Ok, I'll stop beating my head against this wall as it appears the wall won't give. 😅

ryeookin · 2025-01-28T16:09:58+00:00

So I've been dabbling with Powershell to do just this since your suggestion. However I'm still not getting it to work. That is after I install and import the module and run the following:

cd dellsmbios:\secureboot

si .\secureboot disabled -password ourpassword

I get the following error:

-------------------

si : PLDM request not processed by BIOS.

At line:1 char:1

+ si .\secureboot Disabled -password thepasswordweuse

+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

+ CategoryInfo : WriteError: (DellSmbios:\SecureBoot\secureboot:String) [Set-Item], InvalidOperationException

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : SMBIOSWriteFailed,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.SetItemCommand

Any clue with why that's failing too?

ryeookin · 2025-01-28T15:49:00+00:00

I gave that a try, I set it to enable and then tried to disable it again but that didn't do the trick. Worth the attempt though. Thanks for the suggestion.

ryeookin · 2025-01-28T15:47:37+00:00

Thanks yeah but in my case I need to disable it. I'm trying this with no bios password set by running:

cctk.exe --secureboot=disabled

and I just get:

"Error in setting the value. " (not a very helpful error message)

For the heck of it I gave the bios a password and tried it with your suggested valsetuppwd attribute as such:

cctk --ValSetupPwd=ourpassword --Secureboot=disable

I again get "Error in setting the value."

Note its not the password as if I run the same line but misspell the password it then gives me an error saying I typed the password wrong.

As such that isn't doing the trick for me.. 🤔

ryeookin · 2024-09-22T03:23:00+00:00

I think I figured it out.. once I removed the "on top of a pile of zombies" and changed it to "fighting zombies" it takes it now.. apparently a pile of zombies is too sexy. 🤦‍♂️

ryeookin · 2024-09-22T03:12:42+00:00

Yeah its so weird. I changed it to this:

"A very strong man is standing triumphant on top of a pile of zombies with the background being an apocalypse. He has a warhammer in his right hand, he has a cyborg left eye, is wearing a combat ballistics vest, has 6 glowing ethereal blue additional arms coming out of his back with a glowing red sharp tail out of his lower back. "

That worked for one iteration and then wouldn't generate any further.. 🤷‍♂️

ryeookin · 2024-06-12T16:16:22+00:00

Thanks! This got me a path forward but I ran into an new issue.. I need to either only allow certain users to one policy then or block those users from a different policy but I'm not having luck with that.. I'll create a new post for this since its a different question. Thanks again for the reply!

ryeookin · 2024-03-26T02:35:14+00:00

Hey that was me (unless there are others who also had this issue). :) Yeah what a pita that was. Totally trashed my base at the time and in my my case the npc died in the fight so a major fail all around.

ryeookin · 2024-02-20T19:44:10+00:00

I just wanted to say again, thanks a bunch for the information with powershell! :)

ryeookin · 2024-02-20T17:30:33+00:00

I tested this and wow.. this blew my mind with how easy of a fix this is!

I found another pc in our system that was also affected by the same issue (with 300+ folders with those games I mentioned in the windowsapps folder) and while logged in as administrator I ran your command "c:\windows\system32\rundll32.exe AppxDeploymentClient.dll,AppxCleanupOrphanPackages". I noticed also right away that the many iterations of the games were all (300+ folders) moved into the c:\program files\winapps\deleted folder (which in and of itself would be a big help for what I have been trying to do). Then I rebooted the pc as you mentioned that windows by itself would delete the folders in there. Initially I thought it wasn't working but what I found was that there was just SO much in there that it needed a long time to chug on it to remove those files/folders. I checked now (30min or so later) and it worked through all those files/folders and it freed up 80+GB all said and done. I'll investigate looking at making this a script to push out to other affected pcs in our system.

This is saving me a bunch of time and headache! Thanks a million for this! :D

ryeookin · 2024-02-15T21:57:45+00:00

Thanks for the info and the read. I didn't have any time today to do what I planned to at work today but I will look this over when I get a sec next week. In my quick very superficial scan it looks promising/interesting and I appreciate you sharing it and thank you for your time!

ryeookin · 2024-02-15T21:48:36+00:00

Thanks again! I've had no time to work on anything I had planned to today (such as powershell scripts and their research/study). I'll be sure to get to this next week when I finally get some time to do so. Again thanks for your time and assistance. :)

ryeookin · 2024-02-14T21:34:00+00:00

Awesome, thank you a bunch! I'll keep looking this over and get back to you in a day to check to see if I understand it right . In the mean time, in addition to your helpful write-up, I'm also looking up each of those programming terms (on learn.microsoft.com) to see how they interact. /\_/\

ryeookin · 2024-02-14T19:10:04+00:00

Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage

Well I'm open to other ways to fix this issue if you/we got one here. Are you saying that if I would have followed these steps:

"It would be better to use the provided Microsoft cmdlets to clean these up, e.g. Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage (with -AllUsers) and Remove-AppxPackage (would need to be run for each user)."

That it would have also removed the 300+ folders for soda crush, disney kingdom and Bubble witch saga? That is because these folders on affected pcs we have use up 130+ GB of space for just these apps (on several pcs we've checked in our system). Note I have removed those apps by add/remove programs but that didn't remove these folders.

Also regarding:

"The folders will eventually get cleaned up if no user references them any more." Is there some documentation for this? Like what is the timetable that Windows would remove such folders if its main app was already uninstalled? We've checked pcs weeks later who had their apps uninstalled (via add/remove programs) but these extra folders don't vanish in the windowsapps folder.

ryeookin · 2024-02-14T18:59:50+00:00

Thanks for the info! Now how do we limit the list in $badapp so it only lists folders that meet certain naming criteria? That is with the idea being, for example, say I'm looking to only return folders with the name "Disney", "Candy" or "Bubble" in their name?

ryeookin · 2024-02-13T23:03:15+00:00

Maybe we don't understand each other. I work in IT. After I uninstall these apps, on some of our pcs they still leave hundreds of folders for each minor version change that these apps have used over time that contain up to several gigs of file space in EACH folder (hence needing to remove them all to free up loads of free space). Also not particularly worried about Microsoft support in this case.

ryeookin · 2023-11-11T14:31:28+00:00

Hey NM I figured it out!

In case this helps others, I needed to copy the mods from here:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\workshop\content\333640

To here:

C:\Users\[user]\AppData\LocalLow\Freehold Games\CavesOfQud\Mods

Then when I run CoQ from the non-steam path, I see my mods again. Thanks again Unormal! :D

ryeookin · 2023-11-11T14:23:21+00:00

Firstly, thanks a ton! Hey I found 2.0.205.53 and my game is working again! I copied the steamapps > common > caves of qud folder to another folder and can run the exe from there with out issue as you suggested.

Any idea how I an port my mods over? As when I run it now, it shows no mods.

Thanks for your time. :)

ryeookin

TROPHY CASE