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): /[vegastrikefolder]/.vegastrike/save/ for the save file and /.vegastrike/serialized_xml for your ship stats

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 The following instructions are for the csv-file which can be found under .vegastrike\serialized_xml\<name of your savegame>\<name of your ship>.csv

To edit this file you should open it with a spreadsheet program like Excel or Open-/LibreOffice Calc. You should change the settings so, that comma is the only coloum-seperator and double-apostrophes (") function as text-seperators. It is also important, to switch of any form of nubmer recognition, so that 1.2.11 doesn't convert to 01.02.2011 for example.

Weapon Hack

To install your weapons of choice without cheating the money (what inludes increasing difficulty) and finding it ingame, you can change the weapon-mount point and the installed weapons in the csv-file. Find the column "Mounts". The second row should look something like this:

{KtekBeam;-1;3;LIGHT MEDIUM HEAVY AUTOTRACKING ;2.557389;-1.172136;-2.024599;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;1.000000}
{KtekBeam;-1;3;LIGHT MEDIUM HEAVY AUTOTRACKING ;-2.557389;-1.172136;-2.024599;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;1.000000}
{FS_MW_Laser;-1;3;LIGHT MEDIUM HEAVY AUTOTRACKING ;8.557390;3.524599;-0.024599;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;1.000000}
{FS_MW_Laser;-1;3;LIGHT MEDIUM HEAVY AUTOTRACKING ;-8.557390;3.524599;-0.024599;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;1.000000}
{HeavyTractor;-1;0;MEDIUM HEAVY SPECIAL AUTOTRACKING ;0.000000;-1.000000;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;1.000000}{Reaper;-1;21;LIGHT MEDIUM HEAVY AUTOTRACKING ;2.624351;0.000000;-0.161792;0.469265;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;1.000000}
{Reaper;-1;21;LIGHT MEDIUM HEAVY AUTOTRACKING ;-2.624351;-0.161792;0.469265;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;1.000000}
{Torpedo;20;300;LIGHT-MISSILE MEDIUM-MISSILE HEAVY-MISSILE SPECIAL-MISSILE ;2.576582;-1.371560;0.414940;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;1.000000}
{FriendOrFoe;97;300;LIGHT-MISSILE MEDIUM-MISSILE HEAVY-MISSILE SPECIAL-MISSILE ;-2.566918;-1.364659;0.389271;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;1.000000}

As you may notice, every weapon-mountpoint has it's own space in curved brackets {} Lets take a closer look at one of those to understand the interesting values you may want to change:

{Reaper;1500;12;LIGHT MEDIUM HEAVY AUTOTRACKING ;-2.624351;-0.161792;0.469265;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;0.000000;1.000000;1.000000}

• Reaper: the name of the weapon installed in this slot. if no weapon is installed it shows: -

• 1500: the ammo. -1 means "no ammo needed".

• 21: the volume? - I don't know what this is for (--can anybody answer this?).

• some words in UPPERCASES: these determine, which weapon-type can be installed to this slot ingame. The keywords are:
  • LIGHT, MEDIUM, HEAVY, SPECIAL, AUTOTRACKING, LIGHT-MISSILE, MEDIUM-MISSILE, HEAVY-MISSILE, SPECIAL-MISSILE (CAPSHIP-LIGHT, -MEDIUM and -HEAVY could work too / haven't tried it yet)

• three numeric values. these are X,Y and Z coordinates, where the weapon is installed at the ship-model, where 0;0;0 would be the centre of the screen when looking forward and you would see the shot in the middle of your screen when firing. +X means to the left, +Y means up and +Z means more to the front of the vessel.

• some more values(0s and 1s): some vectors that determine to where your weapon shoots. you don't want to change those, i assume. (only useful in subunits on capships)

• the last two numbers are the actual and maximal functionality of your weapon.

Ammunition

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

• buy (or cheat) 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

Maneuverability Hack

There are a couple of variables you can use to change the behaviour of your vessel.

• Afterburner_Speed_Governor: the topspeed you reach with Afterburner (tuning-bonuses not included)
• Default_Speed_Governor: the topspeed you reach with Afterburner (tuning-bonuses not included)

The following acceleration-values determine how fast or slow your ship ajusts it's speed while drifting (based on 100% mass) with the flight-computer(FCMP) switched on:

• Bottom_Accel
• Top_Accel
• Left_Accel
• Right_Accel

• Afterburner_Accel: Acceleration while the afterburner-key is pressed
• Forward_Accel: Normal Acceleration rate to given speed
• Retro_Accel: "brake"-acceleration determines how fast your ship stops

The maneuver-variables determine how fast the "steering" reacts.

• Maneuver_Yaw: horizontal steering
• Maneuver_Pitch: vertical steering
• Maneuver_Roll: reaction on roll-left oder roll-right keys

• Yaw_Governor_Left: top turning-speed to the left
• Yaw_Governor_Right: top turning-speed to the right
• Pitch_Governor_Up: top turning-speed up
• Pitch_Governor_Down: top turning-speed down
• Roll_Governor_Left: rolling speed to the left
• Roll_Governor_Right: rolling speed to the right

• Mass: finally the actual mass can be edited directly, which has influence on all the variables above.

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.

some things to remember:

• when you add/change the Sensor in Cargo, you must change the "Radar_Range" accourdingly (3e+008 for HawkEye 3 or 4 for example) or else it will show up broken.
• same thing with Cloak-Device

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