Saw the title and the mention of the text string texts and thought it was just about that and missed the skill up part

Alchemy is level based. At level 25 the max skill is 5 and it goes up 5 pts with each level after that

Would be important to know what level OP is. At level 30, the max alchemy skill is also 30 and would need to level up more in order to skill higher

Getting that message on every combine, and today spent 1500 p worth of mat's trying for Tiger Raptor cloak. 255 wis, unencumbered, crying in my beer. The cloak sells for like 1k. Tried over three separate tailoring sessions. No likee.

Same issue with low level baking and tailoring as well. Got 8053 error string not found on crafting bat wing crunchies.

Blacksmithing
 

When ever I combine a Sharpening Stone and a Rusty weapon it tells me "ERROR: String not found. (8053)"

ERROR String not found (8053)
 

I combined some pages to make a spell, (enchanter). research skill=127

I assume the combine failed.

Pages used
Nilitim's Grimiore page (115, 116) & (300, 301)

Not sure if it is a good thing or bad.. just letting you guys know.


cheers

i just got this error after the first time trying crafting after a long hiatus. was making pickled lizard

The 8053 String Not Found message is only for the success message, and doesn't affect combine chances. It is the success message. I think it used to be "You have combined these items to make something new."

Just edit eqstr_us.txt with a non-insane text editor (Notepad does not count as non-insane; Notepad++ is fine.)

This system was implemented so you could translate EQ into different languages - just load the text file of the language you're using and BAM, all the messages in your native language. The text can be anything you want. You can do this, for example:

Kudos to you two for actual posting a solution rather than re-reporting a bug 15,000 times.

Oh, boy. I wish I paid attention to this warning. I opened with Notepad and hosed my client - ended up breaking every string in the game.

I then downloaded Visual Studio Code and discovered the file got converted from UTF-8 to UTF-8 with BOM. I have no idea what BOM is, but converting it back to standard UTF-8 encoding fixed the issue and now I have my strings back, including the crafting success string!

Technical explanation follows
 

BOM is the UTF "byte order mark" - this is used in other UTF versions (UTF-16, UTF-32) to tell programs reading this file which way the bytes go, as most files are read a byte at a time, but you need more than one byte to determine a character. Basically - is it BA or AB? ABCD or DCBA? That's what a BOM is for.

However, in UTF-8, this is pretty much pointless - because in UTF-8, the general size of a character is one byte, so there's no order required. It basically is only useful to say "HEY, THIS FILE IS UTF-8!" and is generally regarded as superfluous.

Older software, like EQ, will choke and die on the BOM. UTF text wasn't big in Windows at this time - most of the time you'd have files in one or more code-pages - Windows-1252 being the dominant one for English text in the US. (For giggles: ASCII, UTF-8 and Windows-1252 are generally seen as compatible, but certain characters will be all sorts of broken if you don't properly translate from one to the other. "Smart quotes" are the most common points of breakage.)

I'm not surprised EQ never accounted for people mucking with the interface text files. They're controlled by the server and would have been updated / checksummed by the patcher, so it doesn't surprise me that no engineering effort was expended in making sure EQ could handle a text file in a different format than what was expected.

If I had $10 for every time I had a BOM cause a bomb at my old job (I did a lot of syndication of news articles), I'd have eaten lunch for free most days.