Manual:Cheats

Introduction

This is a one stop shop for cheats and spoilers, or people who whant to change their game experience. If you use these cheats, do not go bragging in the forums about your kill count or how much money you made.

General

Cheats are relatively simple ways to change your game play experience. They are roughly divided into cheats that change the overall game play, cheats that impact a specific saved game, and cheats that change a specific ship that you own.

Game-Play Cheats

Game play cheats change the behavior of the entire game, so even if you start a new game, these cheasts remain after being implemented.

Cargo Exploit

This technique allows you to buy more items of cargo than a planet has for sale. It is more of an exploit than a cheat, because it takes advantage of the game's code without changing the game code, and you are paying a fair price for the cargo you buy. Here are the steps: 1) Buy the cargo you want 2) Save game 3) Sell the cargo 4) DON'T SAVE! Reload your game 5) Now you will have the cargo you bought and the planet or station will have the same cargo in stock again. Buy it. 6) Repeat steps 2-5. Each time you do it, your cargo doubles until you run out of money or cargo space.

When you have a full hold, you can launch and find a place to sell the cargo. If you plan to sell this cargo in the same system and return for more, you should repeat steps 2-4 one more time, so that when you return from the cargo run, there will be a large amount of that cargo to buy. If you leave the system or end the game, it will reset the available cargo at that station to the default ranges.

Docking Automatically

If you have trouble docking with stations, you can open the vegastrike.config file and set planet_collision_docks to TRUE. This will cause you to automatically dock when you hit a planet or station. It seems to have no effect on collisions with capital ships. Also, if a planet or station is hostile and will not allow you to dock, colliding with it will damage or destroy your ship.

Merchant / Fighter Exploit

Another exploit you can use takes advantage of your ability to have an unused ship delivered to your new location. Fill up your large cargo ship with cargo, switch to a small fast fighter, go to your destination, and then 'buy' your cargo ship at the ship dealer->my fleet tab. It will transport your ship to where you are with a minimal fee (50k outsystem, regardless of how far it is, and free insystem), along with all the cargo in it. This method allows you to have the massive cargo hold of a capship while having the speed and agility of a fighter. Beware though. Cargo is saved (in memory and in the hard disk) universally for all ships. Therefore if your cargo ship is full, your fighter will be too, but the weight increase will only be for the last bought cargo which can fit into the hold of a fighter.

Upgrades Available Hack

If you want a cloak (or some other specific upgrade), but are unwilling to completely cheat (as described in the ship cheats), you can increase the probability of finding a cloak (or other specific upgrade) for sale. You can do this by adjusting the units.csv file to have more types of planets/stations sell Upgrades/Experimental (or whatever other types of upgrades you want to make easier to find). You can also adjust the probability that those places will have the desired upgrades for sale. Everything you need to know is in HowTo:Edit_units.csv. Just find a unit that sells the desired type of upgrade, tweak the probability numbers, and copy the information to those stations you want to sell that upgrade. To match upgrades to their types, look in master_parts_list.csv.

Saved Game Cheats

These cheat usually require the hacking of a save game file. It is recommended that you make a copy of your original save game file before actually hacking it. Be especially warned, Windows users; The native notepad (as well as Excel and all other Moneysoft tools) changes the line break formatting and thus corrupts the save file. Usage of notepad++ is recommended.

The save game file can be found in your user directory.

• On Linux: /home/~username/.vegastrike/save/
• On Windows (XP, Vista): /vegastrikedir/.vegastrike/save/

You can download notepad++ at notepad-plus.sourceforge.net

Money

Just change the first number after the sector/system location descriptor of your save game file, that number between the carets (this things "^"). Maximum number is 99 billions, in numbers:

• 99 000 000 000

Rumor has it that this can, eventually, destabilize your game.

There is a setting called "difficulty" that increases a small amount each time you earn a credit... that determines what upgrades the enemy ships have on them. So if you hack your save game credits up to 10^9 credits that probably just increases the difficulty to the highest value immediately. It is supposed to simulate a time line, but based on the progress you make rather than the amount of time passed...

Location / Sector / System

The first entry of your save game file is your saved location. The letter case for the system name must be the same as your /data/sectors/ entries.

Adding Ships

Just open your save game file and you should see in the first line some ships you have. The first one is the one you actually use, then there are the ships you have parked somewhere followed by the sector they are in. Instead of e.g. "tesla" you can also use the "tesla.blank", then its unequipped (some games crash, when using a standard tesla). Just take care, that every ship in this line is followed by the sector its in, except for the first one. You can't have two ships of the same name, so no two "pacifier.milspec" or two "tesla.blank". Enjoy the ride.

Ship-hacking Cheats

When changing your ship, the following link is required reading: HowTo:Edit_units.csv

Ammunition

Tired of paying for Torpedoes, or running out of Razor ammo? If so, here is the cheat:

• buy the weapons you want and save your game
• open the saved game CSV file for your ship
• in the MOUNTS data field, look at the weapons listed there
• weapons that don't need ammo (beams for example) will have a -1 as the next field after the weapon name
• for weapons that do need ammo, change that number to -1
• save the file then load your game

Cargo Cheat

You can hack your saved game file to change a cargo item into other cargo, or one item into many. This can have side effects on your ship's cargo space if you are not careful to change all the values. This task has too many variables for step-by-step instructions. You must read the UNITS.CSV instructions to learn how to do it, and browse the Master_Parts_List.csv file to find the cargo names.

Cloaking Device Hack

There are two ways to get yourself a cloak which are ship cheats.

The easiest, but temporary, solution is to change the "can_cloak" and "cloak_rate" valudes to "1" in the save game CSV file for your ship. However, this cheat only works until you buy Upgrades/Basic_Repair, which will "fix" your ship's stats back to normal and thereby remove the cloak.

The second cheat is to hack the cloak into your ship's saved game CSV file as an installed upgrade, and to remove it from the prohibited_upgrades. You can learn what you need to know to do this by studying HowTo:Edit_units.csv and then editing your ship's saved game CSV file.

Faction standings

See forum entry Changing relationships to other factions with cheating?! and the Wiki entry HowTo:Edit_faction_relationships