Lost my core classes somehow. How do I get them back?
 

Okay, big first for me here.

I've been doing a bunch of development in a copy of my Pathfinder folder (not my main Pathfinder folder, thankfully), and I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point the core classes (Wizard, Fighter, Rogue, etc, just everything from the PHB) have disappeared on me. And I mean completely. Not only are the classes not showing up on the class portal, but the class Things aren't even showing up in the editor (their class specials still seem to be there, though).

It's just in the copy folder where this problem is happening; my base PF folder is fine.

I'm sure I could just blow away this folder and re-create it, but I'd rather treat that as a last resort due to the work I'd face in restoring my development work. So short of that, I've tried re-downloading the latest Pathfinder update to this folder, and also copying over the files from my base Pathfinder folder (skipping duplicates), but that hasn't worked.

Any ideas? Someone tell me I'm not the first person to have this problem.

Any sources that might be precluding stuff?

Nope. Nothing in this folder but LWD content plus my own project, which has no precludes. I've also tried turning off all sources.

Have you tried removing your custom files, and then reintroducing them one-by-one?

Good thought. I just tried removing all my custom files, completely restarting HL, and...no change, sadly.

I think I'll leave it this way for now, with my custom files out of the way.

In the develop there is an option for "Choose Supplemental Packages". Select that and it will have a list of packages, and my first guess is that you've turned off the core class packs there somehow. If you see any boxes unchecked, check them and then restart the program.

I checked that earlier; everything on that list is from my purchased data packages. There are checkboxes for classes from that content (Magus, Oracle, etc) but not for the core classes.

For what it's worth, I think the problem may have started after I first used this menu. I was testing a solution I had developed regarding an unwanted dependency. To make sure my solution still worked without Campaign Pack #1 enabled, I turned that package off in this menu and restarted HL. It's sometime after that that I noticed my core classes being gone. Whether this is related I can't be sure, but the timeframe is about right.

I'm not in front of my PC now, but I think tonight I will try copying over the files from my base PF folder again, only this time I'll let it overwrite duplicate files. Maybe there's a corrupt file and HL is failing gracefully by ignoring it?

A few versions back HL got "funky" in how it dealt with all the different Packages and Licenses. The ability to manually turn them on/off went even crazy and wrote strange things out to the preferences files. Sounds like you where hit with the same issue I had but mine hit the Bestiary data sets instead.

To fix you have two options.
1) The quickest/easiest method is you simply rename your secondary folder to something else like just put a "2" in it.

2) You can edit the herolab.prefs file directly. Be sure to make a backup first.
Look for a XML element called "pool" where the name attribute matches your pathfinder game folder.. Here is the one for the Campaign Pack:
Under that is a section called:
which lists all the official Packages with a "0" meaning "OFF" and a "1" meaning "ON".

You can try deleting all these preferences and let HL rebuilt with the current correct ones. You can also go through and turn ALL these preferences to a "1" which should activate everything again.

Those are my suggestions. :)

Well, I rolled a 1 on my Reading Comprehension check so I missed these particular steps and didn't end up trying them. Instead I tried copying over the child nodes from the pool for my good Pathfinder folder to that of the working folder and restarted HL. Didn't work.

So at that point I exercised the Nuclear Option - rename the working folder, create a new folder of the same name, and bring over the files I had created from the previous working folder. Crude, but it did fix the problem.

If this happens again, I'll try the more surgical approach you outlined and see if that helps, then post the results here for posterity's sake.

Thanks, everyone.