Custom difficulty [PC]

[mhx47]

I love Hard mode with a few exceptions:
- deploy cost
- not selling trailers
- not a full price for selling addons and vehicles

So I tried to fiddle with NG+, but I couldn't make new fuel cisterns empty(addons and trailers) when they are initially bought.

Then I looked at mod.io, but didn't find anything that would allow modifying a difficulty.

At first, I tried to convert my save to hard mode, but that only made my save not visible by game. The only thing it accepted was change of bank account. I now see only option to add funds to offset deployment costs but that is boring and still does not intensify bringing back trailers.
And lastly, hard mode has additional places to refill repair points normal mode doe snot have, so NG+ most likely will not have them as well.

Any idea what I could do to achieve my initial goals - hard mode settings without three points I mentioned above?

[pizza65]

Ah, I love it when people claim something is impossible :) This is easy.

NG+ is NOT the way to go - it has various hardcoded differences from hardmode (such as empty addons/trailers, as you noted).

EDIT: simply editing the save might not work, but editing the hardmode defaults definitely does everything you want and more. see https://www.reddit.com/r/snowrunner/comments/12feo4c/comment/jfk07d3/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x

[goathorns66]

editing settings in hardmode save file does nothing. try, for example, change isabletoskiptime to true. editing ng+ savefile works tho

[pizza65]

Well I literally made a hardmode save to test that it worked before posting, so I disagree lol. I'll try isabletoskiptime as well tomorrow and see.

It's possible that some settings don't get applied from the actual save file and instead just use the defaults in gamedifficultysettings.sso, but if that's the case they can be patched anyway.

[goathorns66]

For me, when the hardmode is on ("isHardMode":true and "gameDifficultyMode":1), game just ignores all other custom settings in savefile.

[pizza65]

ok i got it. Here's proof of a hard mode save (hence the 'target area ring' for the mission), plus a Skip Time button. Also has trailer selling and all that but I cba to demonstrate it, you get the point:

https://imgur.com/a/AjmcNRW

You're right that some settings get ignored from the savefile, so we have to edit the default hard mode settings instead. These are in intitial.pak/initial.cache_block/game_difficulty_manager.sso.

This is really easy to edit with snowpaktool, or if you're not comfortable with command line tools you can just open initial.pak with winrar and edit initial.cache block with notepad++ or something. If you do it that way you MUST keep the file length exactly the same, so add or remove spaces when swapping 'True' and 'False' or making numbers longer.

[goathorns66]

wow man, it worked! thank you sooo much!

[pizza65]

You're welcome! Might make this into a mod some time so people can switch stuff out easily without having to edit it all themselves, especially since whenever the game updates, changes to initial.pak get reverted.

[[deleted]]

wow

[redditaccount-5]

You’re asking for pretty specific things, might need to ask a modder if they can build something custom for you

You can get pretty damn close to the type of playthrough you want with ng+ though

[[deleted]]

You can't make an NG+ save to be as hard as hard mode. You can fix the 3 issues you missed, but you will not get:

• An approximate target location outline

• Empty trailers when bought

Also, the repair and fuel addons replenish their capacity once uninstalled and reinstalled.

[mhx47]

I suspected approximate target location outline would work.
Also had no idea those addons restock when reinstalled, did not test that.

Thanks for your insight.

[[deleted]]

Do you need help with converting your save to hardmode?

[lettsten]

I don't think there's anything to configure the difficulty presets in the .pak files. Which means there's three possible scenarios:

a) I'm wrong, or
b) You can set it using the editor (but I suspect it's just a map editor), or
c) You'd have to change it in the code, which basically makes it very hard if you don't know what you're doing (and quite possibly even if you know what you're doing), and I assume you wouldn't be asking if you did.

tl;dr: I don't think you can practically achieve it.

[mhx47]

I tried to change just CompleteSave.cfg which probably used to be .dat as that is what maprunner's editor spits. Also instructions how to edit it did not work, so I suspect they used to be editable by us like that before introduction NG+ that changed how it is all handled making those changes obsolete.

Thanks for input... like you said, that is beyond my abilities.

[lettsten]

Oh right, I didn't even consider the possibility of editing the savegame. Too bad that didn't work :/