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Sacred 2 Character Editor Guide - How to modify save games without scripting


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You really explained the process well and the tool is a true blessing, indeed. I actually made a level 5 Niiob Character! I then moved her back into Bronze where I leveled her up. So really, the tool accomplishes so much and really allows so many options. As you mentioned you may correct/or add a name. I think that the ability to change the hairstyle and color of hair and skin may be useful. Perhaps with the color sliders one may uncover the ability for more subtle variations.

 

I especially like the fact that you can build a shopper and blacksmith to equip your characters before they go out questing. Thank you for this tutorial and your significant contributions Androdion!

 

:drool:

 

 

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Sacred 2 Character Editor Guide - How to modify save games without scripting

 

Introduction:

 

Have you ever made a mistake with your character's name and wanted to change it but wouldn't risk starting over again because of a typo? Or maybe you looked at all the sweet stuff the Closed Net players could do that are no longer available? Perhaps you just wanted to mess around a bit with an editor and edit parts of your save game? Well, the tool exists and I've played around with it for some time so I'm here to try and compile my findings, sharing the wealth if you will, since Sacred 2 Character Editor is actually a very powerful and versatile tool that allows for near instant modifications to your save game without any need for scripting game files. It's a very friendly front-end program that changes the parameters of the save game instead of altering the ones in the game, so no more need to edit script files means that practically anyone can do it without being afraid of screwing up. And it's very easily reversible since all you need to do is create a new character and edit the new save game. Sounds nice doesn't it?! Trust me, it is. ;)

 

 

The golden goose:

 

Before I start going into detail let me introduce the aforementioned program, Sacred 2 Character Editor which is available for download here. Take a look at the pictures below and you'll notice that it's really simple in its presentation, though complex in how it presents a lot of information.

 

 

S2CE-1_zpsnbwjyihz.png

 

S2CE-2_zpsgrwg3fah.png

 

S2CE-3_zps8ykpl1hu.png

 

S2CE-4_zpszrju0get.png

 

S2CE-5_zpskzwyghsp.png

 

S2CE-6_zpszlzllbla.png

 

 

Phew, that's a lot to take in right?! Tell you what, let's just concentrate on the first, second and fourth tabs; Character Basics, Stats and Skills, since these are pretty much the only ones we'll be working with. I haven't really tried fooling around with changing the character's appearance or anything because for that I have the game's character creation menu, so I don't really see the point. In theory it's possible to change Combat Arts values as well but I haven't done it. If anyone wants to add that info later on by all means. ;) So, let's focus on the tabs shall we?

 

  • Character Basics

Here is where you can change the character's name, alignment (though I don't recommend it considering it might screw up the quest log), amount of gold carried, difficulty reached and enabling or disabling Hardcore Mode and Expert Touch.

  • Stats

Here you can change the character's level, amount of experience earned, available skills and available skill and stat points.

  • Skills

Here you can edit the skills your character has, which amounts to changing them as much as changing their current level.

 

 

Using the Character Editor:

 

1. Creating a single player ladder of Niobium shoppers and a Niobium blacksmith

 

Have you ever noticed a skill called Bargaining? That particular skill is meant to improve the quality of the wares you're offered at each merchant, and developing that skill will allow you access to top gear that you wouldn't have in any other way. I'm talking about merchants offering only yellow items, which means better gear and an insane amount of modifiers. Now consider that with each difficulty level the quality of each item also increases, meaning that the same item in Silver will be better than in Bronze, in Gold it will be better than in Silver and so on. Considering this factor then the best possible items are to be found in Niobium right? Correct. So if you want a shopper you'd better have one that has reached Niobium right? Correct again. But then... how can you have a level 2 shopper if you need to reach Niobium?! This could be done in Multiplayer, where a higher levelled player could invite a lower level one and players fooled around with this idea. But what about us playing in single player? We all want the goodies as well dang! Well, now it can be done.

 

 

These are the steps that need to be followed in order to achieve it:

 

  • Create a Bronze level character and choose a class that has access to the Bargaining Skill as a primary skill (Dragon Mage, High Elf or Inquisitor). The Shadow Warrior doesn't have the skill and all other three classes have it as a secondary skill so they'll need an extra step for this to work out. Once you have created your character start the single player campaign, skip the cinematic intro, save and exit.
  • Now that you've created your save game we can mess around with it a bit. Open the Character Editor and select the save file correspondent to the character you just created. Navigate to the Stats tab, raise it to level 2 and give it one available skill point. Don't change anything else and don't worry about the experience level being screwed up as you don't need to level this character. Save the changes made and exit the Character Editor.
  • Run Sacred 2 once again, pick the edited character and load the save game. On this step you just need to pick Bargaining. That's all. Save and exit.
  • Time to open Character Editor again. Open the save file and navigate to the Skills tab, you'll now notice it's populated instead of blank, and that it features the Bargaining skill with one skill point assigned. Edit that value and place 255 which is the limit value for hard points on any skill. Now navigate to the first tab, Character Basics, and edit two more values. Change difficulty reached from Silver to Niobium and the amount of gold carried to a near infinite value, let's say one billion. Just be sure to place it in this format (1000000000) instead of this (1.000.000.000) since it's an integer value. Save the changes made and exit the Character Editor. You won't be needing it anymore.
  • Now that you have your character set up with enough gold to buy Ancaria and enough Bargaining to have all yellow wares offered it's time to go shopping, without dying preferably. But how? If we start a level 2 character in Niobium it won't last a heartbeat! Well, it's actually easy as pie. Instead of starting Single Player start Multiplayer instead, and pick LAN as if you were to host a LAN game. Select your edited character, enter the Lobby and create a game. Now give a name to the server (it's mandatory but it doesn't really matter what you write), change the difficulty to Niobium (it will be available despite the level difference) and run it in Free Play mode. You'll be spawned at the Start Island where you can find a gear merchant, a rune merchant and a blacksmith. There's also a chest there, but since you have the Carrier Imp it's not very important either way.
  • Shop, shop and shop again. But do it like this in order to be faster; shop the three merchants in Start Island, teleport to Sloeford and shop the gear merchant there (the blacksmith and rune merchants aren't available because they're dependant on completing their respective quests). Once you're done in Sloeford just teleport back to Start Island and the merchants will have different wares on display. Repeat this process as many times as you want, though at a certain point you'll notice that the wares shown start being the same. At this point it's time to save and exit and restart the lobby.

 

 

And you're done. Now you have a level 2 Niobium shopper that can provide your other characters with the best gear you can have to use in Single Player mode. If you want to keep feeding you Single Player characters with more high levelled gear all you need to do is replicate the save file of the level 2 shopper and edit it once more, just up the character's level to the required value. I recommend using shoppers at levels 2, 15, 45 and 75, since level 15 gear achieved this way is still rocking around the thirties. You don't need to equip the first two shoppers with "+Bargaining" gear, but once you get to the level 45 one you'll have to start investing in that because the diminishing returns of the Bargaining skill start taking a toll on the quality of the wares on display. So start shopping for armour with bonuses to Bargaining, or in alternative equip your character with its respective Mutation Set and place every "+All Skills" ring and amulet you can shop in every socket. Either way you'll have to get Bargaining really high, and I mean high as in the several hundreds of points. Just browse the merchants and when the majority of the items shown are yellow again you can stop, that's the rule of thumb.

 

I mentioned in the first step that you'd need another step in order to have a Dryad, Seraphim, Shadow Warrior or Temple Guardian shopper didn't I? Relax, it's not anything overly complicated. Since three of these classes have Bargaining as a secondary skill and the other doesn't even have it, it means that once you try to allocate the initial skill point on it in the game you won't be able to. But fear not! Place the skill point on any other of the primary General Skills (the green ones) and save and exit as you would normally. Now when you're going to edit the skill value to 255 you'll need to first change the skill from the one you chose in-game to the Bargaining skill. Place the according 255 points and save the changes. And that's all you really need to do differently. Now you can have shoppers for every character class in the game.

 

As for making a level 2 Niobium blacksmith the process is as simple as creating a level 2 shopper, except you'll choose your character to be a Shadow Warrior and place the first skill point in the Blacksmith skill instead of the Bargaining skill. Follow exactly the same steps as before and once you start the lobby with it you'll be able forge rings into bronze sockets and amulets into silver sockets (which normal NPC blacksmiths can't do), as well as be able to remove socketed items and have a chance to not loose them in the process. This level 2 Niobium blacksmith can be used at any time and doesn't need any kind of equipment. Just put whatever you need socketing in the shared chest, start the lobby and use its forging ability. Then place it back in the shared chest and feed your Single Player characters with properly forged items.

 

 

2. Creating a single player level 75 unskilled character with Niobium access

 

Have you ever been bothered about having to go through Silver and Gold just to start warming up in the real deal that's Platinum difficulty? Or have you ever just wanted to jump right into Niobium because there's where the best stuff is and the hardest challenges lie? Maybe you started a build and suddenly it couldn't resist higher difficulties. Maybe that happened a dozen times and you got frustrated with all those hundreds of hours lost?! How about starting and level 75 with an unskilled character at any difficulty and field testing your build, trying it out in the open? Better yet, why not just start straight at the Niobium campaign at mastery level and have a real challenge without the hassle of completing the game three times in a row just to get there?

 

Yeah I know I know, those are a lot of interrogations right there. But to sum it up, you can actually have level 75 unskilled characters in Single Player with access to Niobium. How? Look below.

 

 

These are the steps that need to be followed in order to achieve it:

 

  • Create a Bronze level character and customize it as you see fit. Choose its name, alignment and everything else as you'd normally do in order to start a new campaign. Start the campaign, skip the cinematic intro, save and exit. Now exit the game, it's time to make use of the Character Editor once again.
  • Open the Character Editor and select the save file you just created. Now navigate to the Stats tab and let's edit it accordingly. You'll need to edit the following values to these:
  1. Change level to 75
  2. Change XP to 47031600
  3. Change available skills to 10
  4. Change available skill points to 286
  5. Change available stat points to 100
  • Now navigate to the Character Basics tab. All you're left with is changing the difficulty reached to Niobium, though if you want you can also change the amount of gold carried to a value you'd like it to be. But that's entirely facultative given the purpose of this guide.
  • Save the changes and exit. Now start the game and enjoy!

 

Yes, that's really all you need to do. Easy as pie isn't it?! Now you can enjoy your Niobium trip started at mastery level or just field test any build in any difficulty. Sweet stuff and very easy to do. For reference's sake you can try out a full pack with the seven different classes that I uploaded to the Download Section. Try it here.

 

That's all folks! I hope you enjoy this guide and that it proves helpful. Props to Hooyaah for submitting a blank level 75 multiplayer HE that helped fill in the blanks in terms of the math needed to make this happen.

Great work! A great how- to manual, with lots of details and built in positivity. For someone wanting to have fun with our Precious^^

 

Thanks Androdion!

:)

 

gogo

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I especially like the fact that you can build a shopper and blacksmith to equip your characters before they go out questing.

 

Yeah, my point with the ladder of shoppers was exactly that. ;) That and shopping for "+All Skills" yellow amulets and rings, which as far as I know is only possible via Bargaining. This way any player can purchase those elusive items, and the fact that by this guide any class can have a dedicated shopper means you can have better gear for your, say, SW than what you'd buy with a HE shopper. That alone makes a ton of difference in the gear modifiers!

 

Thanks for the kind words you two, I put a bit of work into this because I wanted it to be properly written. Guess I achieved it, so great! :)

I thought it worth mentioning that one may get great results when shopping with out selecting the Bargaining Skill. I does require altering the balance file, but it works well and one may then select a different skill instead. There is a thread about amending the balance file here:

http://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/18409-sacred-2-balancetxt/?hl=balance

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Can't the Character Editor modify the Survival Bonus? I have a high level HC char who died against the Abishai, resurrected him but for survival bonus...? Any advices to get the SB back to its valor would be appreciated (I won't let my pc running all the night against a kobold...) :) I don't even know the valor of the SB when he died (he was level 137).

Thanks.

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Can't the Character Editor modify the Survival Bonus? I have a high level HC char who died against the Abishai, resurrected him but for survival bonus...? Any advices to get the SB back to its valor would be appreciated (I won't let my pc running all the night against a kobold...) :) I don't even know the valor of the SB when he died (he was level 137).

Thanks.

I took a look at one of my ongoing save files and I couldn't find any reference to the SB value, anywhere. There's a lot to be edited, but apart from specific CA modifications/levels that need to be expanded everything else that can be edited is shown in the pictures I put in the OP.

 

Sorry mate, can't help you with that one.

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Thanks Androdion, np :)

 

One way I found (thanks to Flix I think to remember on another thread) is to edit an item, a ring here (he has this ring equiped twice), putting it a high SB value like 200% and fight. I will adjust this value, play, and according to the wiki page about SB ( http://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Survival_Bonus ) and the total time I've played with him, I will stop the edit on the rings when I will have reached an approx. value of the estimated SB value he got. Will be better than nothing.

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1 hour ago, Androdion said:

Hey Gogo thanks for the heads up on Steam, I've updated the OP to have the images back again. ;)

Guide loox awesome again!

:bounce:

 

gogo

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Nice little tool. Was messing around a bit with it (after I made a backup of the savefiles ;))

Now I have a Seraphim on the Dark Side :wow:

Sort of, she can't take on the Main Quest. You enter Sloeford, Seraphim says "I should talk to the Towns Elder" (or something like that, I'm playing in german, so...). After that, there is neither the Light nor the Shadow Main Quest available :mellow:

Dosn't matter at all, she has fun slaying monsters. :smile:

 

 

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Glad you're having fun with it. ;)

Yeah although you can change everything not everything is bound to work correctly, light side/dark side assignments being one particular case because of the quest scripting. But most if not all of the aspects related solely to the character can be changed freely without much hassle.

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  • 1 year later...
29 minutes ago, Abraxys said:

That's a really incredible piece of art you created with that program! Must have been hard work to write all the code it took.
It really makes Sacred 2 even more fun to play! Thank you really really much for sharing this nice program with us!
Plus it's super great that this tool is still available in 2020 cause I still love to play Sacred 2!

Greetings Abraxys

I know that Androdion will appreciate your first post here being a sincere thank you for his work :bounce:

  We're happy you found your way to our little community...

Welcome to DarkMatters Abraxys!

:)

gogo

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I appreciate the kind words yes. I've read your PM and your post here and I have to say that I'm taking credit where I shouldn't, since I've written a guide on how to use the tool and not the tool itself. I've tried finding the original thread for the tool but I can't seem to, otherwise I'd point you towards the person who actually coded it. Maybe @Flix has an idea on who did it.

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This are the credits included with the Save Editor:

Sacred 2 Character Editor V0.9.0.0

By DescentJS
Modified by Sainox
Combat Arts, Achievements, Looks, Stats and some other cool stuff added by Karach0s

Translations:
Polish - Karach0s
French - Redgbreaker

  • Russian guys - Creating s2sdec.exe - the decoder for Sacred 2 saves.
  • DescentJS - Creating the initial version of the editor.
  • ase69_s - Making his valuable changes.
  • MT4K - Finding the missing Shadow Warrior Combat Art.
  • VirusSX - Finding an OutOfRangeException on the CA tab (and even documenting a fix for it).
  • gasper- Providing saves that allowed me to discover and fix some critical bugs.
    • - Providing chest file that allowed me to find the Dragon Mage achievement.
    • - Finding an OutOfRangeException on the level up button.
  • acidoangel - Finding a max value bug on the CA level box.
  • jimbouk - Providing saves that allowed me to discover and fix NullReferenceException bug during save.
    • - Finding and providing source for the s2sdec.exe program, thus allowing me to fix it to decode and repack chest files.
    • - Finding a hex value in the chest file, that allows to unlock game movies.
    • - Writing down possible game version values in a save file.
  • Funest- Finding and documenting a NullReferenceException bug during save.
  • sven_wilde
  • TinGoose - Providing a specially prepared Dragon Mage savegame that allowed me to find Dragon Mage class skills.
  • amrastin - Providing a chest file that allowed me to discover and fix some achievement bugs.
  • lngc16506- Finding mixed High Elf CA descriptions.
  • redgbreaker - Providing Sacred 2 skill, CA and stat icons in one compressed archive, so that I didn't have to search for them all over the web.
    • - Translating the editor to French.
  • unknowngst - Posting a guide (at darkmatters.org) on how to edit character looks in the savefile.
  • aerion0p - Finding a hair color bug.
  • k8d0s - Providing a save file that allowed me to find and fix the incorrect starter byte bug.
  • FTR - Posting a guide (at darkmatters.org) on how to edit Expert Touch in the savefile.
  • Treufeldt - Providing a a save file, that allowed me to find and fix the "Experience not found" bug.

 

I believe because of the hardcore lockdown on any discussion of modding/hacking on the official forums, and DarkMatters' adherence to the same restrictions, most of the work on this project had to be done elsewhere/behind the scenes, so we'll probably never know much about it, other than the above.

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2 hours ago, Flix said:

This are the credits included with the Save Editor:

Sacred 2 Character Editor V0.9.0.0

By DescentJS
Modified by Sainox
Combat Arts, Achievements, Looks, Stats and some other cool stuff added by Karach0s

Translations:
Polish - Karach0s
French - Redgbreaker

  • Russian guys - Creating s2sdec.exe - the decoder for Sacred 2 saves.
  • DescentJS - Creating the initial version of the editor.
  • ase69_s - Making his valuable changes.
  • MT4K - Finding the missing Shadow Warrior Combat Art.
  • VirusSX - Finding an OutOfRangeException on the CA tab (and even documenting a fix for it).
  • gasper- Providing saves that allowed me to discover and fix some critical bugs.
    • - Providing chest file that allowed me to find the Dragon Mage achievement.
    • - Finding an OutOfRangeException on the level up button.
  • acidoangel - Finding a max value bug on the CA level box.
  • jimbouk - Providing saves that allowed me to discover and fix NullReferenceException bug during save.
    • - Finding and providing source for the s2sdec.exe program, thus allowing me to fix it to decode and repack chest files.
    • - Finding a hex value in the chest file, that allows to unlock game movies.
    • - Writing down possible game version values in a save file.
  • Funest- Finding and documenting a NullReferenceException bug during save.
  • sven_wilde
  • TinGoose - Providing a specially prepared Dragon Mage savegame that allowed me to find Dragon Mage class skills.
  • amrastin - Providing a chest file that allowed me to discover and fix some achievement bugs.
  • lngc16506- Finding mixed High Elf CA descriptions.
  • redgbreaker - Providing Sacred 2 skill, CA and stat icons in one compressed archive, so that I didn't have to search for them all over the web.
    • - Translating the editor to French.
  • unknowngst - Posting a guide (at darkmatters.org) on how to edit character looks in the savefile.
  • aerion0p - Finding a hair color bug.
  • k8d0s - Providing a save file that allowed me to find and fix the incorrect starter byte bug.
  • FTR - Posting a guide (at darkmatters.org) on how to edit Expert Touch in the savefile.
  • Treufeldt - Providing a a save file, that allowed me to find and fix the "Experience not found" bug.

 

I believe because of the hardcore lockdown on any discussion of modding/hacking on the official forums, and DarkMatters' adherence to the same restrictions, most of the work on this project had to be done elsewhere/behind the scenes, so we'll probably never know much about it, other than the above.

:thumbsup:

yah

copy right  is so wonky and never easy to understand or predict

who woulda thunk that the mouse would live forever...

 :blink: 

gogo

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