The Open Cave Shard Troubleshooting

The Open Cave Shard is currently unmaintained. It means that no support is available from people with in-depth knowledge of the Shard and its inner workings. Because of that, I have been contacted by several people who ran into trouble during or after installing TOC.

Currently, the installer is broken. It will not install a playable game at the moment.

As far as I know, The Open Cave does not run on Win 10 and up, but it does run on Win 7 and 8. It might also run on winXP but I did not test this. It runs well under wine (9.0) on Linux, but performance will vary depending on video card and drivers.

To install the game I created a compressed file, containing the TOC-Moul folder including all the files that TOC needs to run. The download link for this file is further down this page. This file can be used to install TOC in three different ways:

1. Simple install
2. Full install (preferred method)
3. Full install (alternate method)

This installation method is the fastest. Put the TOC-Moul-full.rar file in the directory where you want to create the game folder (TOC-Moul). Use winrar or any other tool capable of extracting rar files to extract the TOC-Moul folder including all of its contents here.

This method is much like running the game from usb-stick. It has the disadvantage that the installer script is not run and therefor no menu-entries for the start menu are created, no icon is created and vcredist_x86.exe is not run. Chances are you'll want to install the vcredist_x86.exe before starting the game. If it is already installed you can choose to abort. In most cases this should be all you have to do to run the game. Start it with UruLauncher.exe.

Should you have no sound at all in the game while other programs have sound, try installing openAL by running the oalinst.exe file.

This installation method will install the game including menu entries and icons. It is currently the fastest way to do a full install of The Open Cave shard.

Put the TOC-Moul-full.rar file in the directory where you want to create the game folder (TOC-Moul). Use winrar or any other tool capable of extracting rar files to extract the TOC-Moul folder including all of its contents here.

Now start the installer by running the TOC-Moul.exe file. When it asks you where to install The Open Cave, select the TOC-Moul folder that was created in the previous step. The installer will warn you that doing so will make the TOC-Moul folder unsuitable for running Cyan's Moula, which is fine. Click yes to continue. Using this method the installer will not try to download the datafiles from the Cyan server as the files are already in the TOC-Moul folder. After the installer is finished, the game should start (unless you uncheck where it says: "Run TOC-MOUL").

Should you have no sound at all in the game while other programs have sound, try installing openAL by running the oalinst.exe file. If you still got no sound from the game, even after installing openAL, delete the TOC-Moul folder and extract the archive again in its place.

This installation method will install the game including menu entries and icons. I do not recommend this method unless the others fail. This method takes a lot of time as it downloads all the datafiles from the moula server (1.9 GB) while a lot of it isn't even used in TOC. Cyan also put a cap at 300 kB/s for the downloadspeed. It took me more than 2 hours to download all data.

To start the installation run the TOC-Moul.exe file. On windows you will want to change the location where TOC will be installed. Proceed with the installation and shortly after you will see the following screen:

This is where you can go shopping or watch a movie, as it will take at least 2 hours to complete. After this you should see the following screen:

It is important to uncheck where it says: "Run TOC-MOUL". You don't want to run the game now as the datafiles are in a messed up state at this point. Click Finish to end the installation program.

Put the TOC-Moul-full.rar file in the same directory as where you have the game folder (TOC-Moul). Rename the TOC-Moul folder to TOC-Moul-bu or delete it if you prefer. Use winrar or any other tool capable of extracting rar files to extract the TOC-Moul folder including all of its contents here. The TOC-Moul folder in the file TOC-Moul-full.rar replaces the entire game folder.

Now you should be able to start the game by clicking on the icon in the start menu.