No, I'm not suggesting deleting the section, but temporarily commenting out the problematic line in the r4e09f.cfg file. You won’t find the issue any other way. The only options are to either modify the code or comment it out. Since you don't yet know how to properly modify it, the least you can do is comment out a specific piece of code to check if it's really the source of the problem. Once you identify the exact problematic line, you can post it here, and someone will help you resolve the issue.

And this is actually the most interesting file once you've worked out all your minor technical issues. Explanations for this file are here

wrote:

I'm not modifying any of the original files, here's what my baseq3 directory contains:

├── pak0.pk3
├── pak1.pk3
├── pak2.pk3
├── pak3.pk3
├── pak4.pk3
├── pak5.pk3
├── pak6.pk3
├── pak7.pk3
└── pak8.pk3

Nothing else.

All the custom stuff is handled under Excessive Plus (EP) mode. All custom stuff - meaning my bot names pack.

Then, unfortunately, I can't tell you how to solve your problem. It means I haven't encountered anything like this. If I knew for sure that it was in a specific place, I could figure it out. But as it is, I have no idea where to dig.

You'll figure everything out little by little. All the most interesting stuff is actually in this file, since it fine-tunes the game rules — physics, weapons, and a ton of other things. In fact, experimenting with it is the most enjoyable part. Once you start slowly tweaking one parameter at a time, you'll eventually create your own custom config instead of r4e09f.cfg. That's exactly what I did. I used default.cfg as a base, commented out some things, changed others. In the end, I have several versions for the kind of gameplay I really enjoy.

Well, if you have a completely clean baseq3 folder, then you need to look for the problem in the excessiveplus folder. Look for q3dm17.ents in the maps folder in the archives .pk3. I may be wrong, but I have no other ideas

# 1. Locate the .ents file in your mod folder
find /q3server/excessiveplus -type f -name "q3dm17.ents"
 
# 2. Search inside each .pk3 for q3dm17.ents
for f in /q3server/excessiveplus/*.pk3; do
  unzip -l "$f" | grep -q "maps/q3dm17.ents" && echo "FOUND in $f"
done
 
# 3. If it’s inside pakX.pk3, extract it to your maps directory
unzip /q3server/excessiveplus/pakX.pk3 maps/q3dm17.ents -d /q3server/excessiveplus/maps/
 
# 4. Ensure it’s readable
ls -l /q3server/excessiveplus/maps/q3dm17.ents
chmod a+r /q3server/excessiveplus/maps/q3dm17.ents
 
# 5. Restart & inspect the log
./start_server.sh
tail -n 20 q3server.log

1. Searches for the file in the open form in the mod folder, instead of manually poking through the directories.
2. Scans each .pk3 archive "from the inside" to find out which pack contains the required maps/q3dm17.ents.
3. Automatically extracts the found file to the required folder excessiveplus/maps/, plus sets read permissions for it so that the engine can load it.
4. Finally, restarts the server and shows the last lines of the log to immediately see if the error has disappeared.