In my 8.25 update log I mentioned that I have reduced the amount of mods as best as I could without breaking the entire castle. I apologize but this is the best a vanilla version I could make of this project. It is immensely difficult to create a vanilla version considering the castle arches and structure alone come from conquest reforged. You can reduce mods you find unnecessary but ones that effect the castle itself should probably stay. Up to you though. Again I apologize, if enough people feel strongly that I really should then I might truly consider undertaking that task.

I wil try loading it seemingly as you did and see, but when I encountered this problem it was only because I was on a laptop that couldnt handle what my desktop can do. Also what might be the issue is that if you try to open the game with the files missing then the game itself sometimes could be corrupt. but at that screen you never got to the game so..

One idea i would do is try to increase the ram if you have more? I am trying to be considerate in my newer updates to use less mods because ive allocated 12mb to run around and build free with no lag but to play Im sure 4 is only needed to run generally smooth, 6 should be better. Please let me know if any of that helped or not, im working on reducing the 1.18.2 version down some as well..

I have uploaded a more minimalized version I hope it helps, also as I mentioned in my update log, if you want to remove Twilight mod you can, the belmont whip and a few statues will disappear only.

Thank you for your feedback, Im working right now to solve this. As I would like to have conquest reforged added, I am going to drastically shorten the number of mods to make this a much lighter load. Sorry for the inconvenience.