How to Fix the Red Question Mark Error on Custom Items

Although this issue has been discovered, discussed, and solved, there seems to only be one tutorial, which I’m unable to locate anymore, that detailed a permanent fix to the old red question mark bug on custom items. This tutorial will pretty-much be a rewrite of that tutorial, but I’ll be, hopefully, describing the process a bit more clearly. This bug is always present and causes all custom items to appear with a red question mark icon instead of their proper icon and stops the player from being able to properly use the item in most cases.

In this tutorial I will be explaining, step-by-step, how to grab the necessary data from your database and add it into the Item.dbc file. This tutorial assumes that you know enough to pack the finished DBC file into an MPQ, but if you don’t know how to do it then you can refer to this tutorial. It also assumes that you know enough SQL to be able to edit the provided queries to select your custom items. The final thing that this tutorial assumes is that you use HeidiSQL and know how to use it.

The first step to fixing the red question mark bug is to open up HeidiSQL, log into your server’s MySQL and select the world database. Now run a query similar to the ones provided below. Your query needs to select the same fields, in the same order, as I have done.

SELECT entry, class, subclass, SoundOverrideSubclass, Material, displayid, InventoryType, sheath FROM item_template WHERE entry BETWEEN 80000 AND 100000;

After the query finishes running and all of the result data is shown, click on one of the rows and press CTRL + A. Now that all of the rows are selected, right-click on any of the rows and select Export grid rows, then make sure your options are as follows.

• Output target – Copy to clipboard
• Output format – Delimited text
• Row selection – Complete
• Options – Uncheck the “Include column names” box.
• Options – Set “Field separator” to be a comma.
• Options – Set the “Encloser” to nothing. Just leave the field blank.
• Options – Set the “Line terminator” to “\r\n”, without the quotation marks.
• Options – Set the “NULL value” to “\N”, without the quotation marks.

When you’ve finished setting the correct options, click the OK button. Now, place your Item.dbc file into /Tools/DBCUtil/ and double-click on DBCUtil.exe. This will convert the Item.dbc file into CSV format and output a file named Item.dbc.csv, this is the file that we will be editing. Proceed to the /Tools/CSVed/ folder and double-click CSVed.exe. After the program opens, press CTRL + O, and open the Item.dbc.csv file. When the file opens, scroll to the bottom, right-click on the last record, and select Paste Record(s) below Cursor Pos, and then press CTRL + S and exit the program. The final step, as I am omitting the MPQ portion of the tutorial as previously stated, is to go into /Tools/DBCUtil/, delete Item.dbc, and drag Item.dbc.csv onto DBCUtil.exe to convert it back into a new Item.dbc file with all of your changes.