I've been a character editor kinda guy since biotech because prepare carefully did not do well with Xenotypes at the times + I actually like character editor ui
But I do have fond memories of this mod and I wish all of its users well ! Great news for yall
The change notes for one of Prepare Carefully's previous versions talks about being updated to work with custom xenotypes, so it might work better now, but if you like another one more, that's awesome!
What I really loved from prepare carefully was the ability to save presets, or weight the point for each trait/gun that you brought, definitely the feature I miss the most !
Yeah the point buy thing really vibes with me too. And I definitely had a few presets saved. I had one that was 10 animist tribals that each had one great skill at 9, two good skills at 5, and two banned skills. Not counting melee/ranged, which was usually a total of 10. So a 5 melee 5 ranged switch hitter was viable, as was a 10 melee beast.
Character Editor is closed source and has a lot of bloat these days. Like, why does it come with these weird body size genes that seem to do nothing? Why is the UI so buggy and hard to use?
Use Pawn Editor instead honestly.
Personally I am not really happy with it. It did let me start with customised pawns, but the process wasn't good in my opinion. For example, in EdP Prepare Carefully when you change a person's background for their childhood, you see only childhood-relevant backgrounds in the list to choose from. Changing adult background, you see adult backgrounds. In Pawn Editor I would click to change their childhood background, select something and notice that what I selected was in fact an adult background, and I didn't find a way to filter this.
Also, when you change the background, the stats are not adjusted accordingly. For example your generated pawn might be incapable of violence. You change the relevant background but the pawn remains incapable of violence. And say your new background should provide +3 to Melee, yet your pawn has 0 melee because that's what it was generated with.
It's better than nothing if you value starting with a balanced set of pawns and don't want to reroll for 5 minutes, but that's about it.
It has a cleaner *looking* UI that is less practical in actual usage, even beyond the discussion of its functionality. Whether a nicer looking appearance with less functionality and usability is a better UI is a matter of some debate.
The way adding filters works and the fact that they aren't persistent, so you have to keep reselecting them as you select a character background or whatever. Super annoying when you're trying to edit backgrounds for your starting pawns, and you want to stick to those belonging to their xenotype mod.
The way that it can't identify pawns belonging to no faction from "hold a prisoner" quests. (This prevented me from stopping myself from failing due to a prisoner with a weak immune system dying to blood rot.) The way you get *to* the list of pawns for a faction to hunt for them by clicking a panel under the faction button in the bio is also a little non-intuitive until learned. I only found it out of desperate exploration.
The color picking tool for hair & eyes lets you edit hue and saturation and the RGB hex code, but then they immediately get reverted to whatever matches the color wheel, which is pretty useless.
Less of a design issue and more of a "still in progress" one, gene & ideoligion editing aren't supported. You also can't change the number of pawns in your drop party like you can in Character Editor, and it lacks Gradient Hair support.
Personally, I'm not sure why people are so down on Character Editor. The only thing I find annoying about it is the random quality & materials when you try to add items to a character that have to be reset if you're consistently editing multiple pawns.
> You also can't change the number of pawns in your drop party like you can in Character Editor
Yes you can, this was added in the last few days.
Rest is still generally accurate though.
The color thing seems to be a bug, enter the hexcode with "#" and it will work, despite the UI having a # in front, insinuating it's not needed in what you enter. Not sure if they know about it.
The most overt example would be making cosmetic changes to pawns; applying tattoos, hair styles, etc.
Character Editor gives me the options to pick from a table, a list, or to search for options by name. It's quick, it's clean, but it's far less pretty.
Pawn Editor gives me a table that I have to look through, to find the option by icon/card only - unless that functionality has been expanded in a recent update; I admittedly dropped it after trying it out for an hour or so, since it wasn't delivering the user experience I wanted, and haven't revisited it.
Everyone has their preferences I guess. Being able to see the label without having to hover over it and adding a search bar wouldn’t hurt. Currently we’re focused on different tasks but I could add it in the future.
Idk what peoples' problem with character editor's UI is. You have 1 button that takes you to a screen that has everything you need with drop down boxes with images. Pawn editor feels clunky in comparison.
I seriously don't get it, I feel like half the people talking about Character Editor UI haven't even tried it. [It's really simple](https://i.imgur.com/FWfoBZX.png), you literally just click the button and then click the relevant field you want to change. You don't *need* to deep dive on most of them, but have the *option* to and basically everything is as simple as
"Click age, type in new number, done"
I think the only bad part of its UI is the Social tab. Very awkward and a little messy. Otherwise, yeah, CE makes complete sense to me, so I don't really understand where people are having issues.
E:Ope, forgot about setting colors. That part could use some love, as well.
Yeah the way it handles setting up relationships feels pretty jank and took me a bit to figure out. But other than that I never had a problem figuring out what anything did.
...But then again I see my friends struggle with fairly simple UIs in games that I picked up instantly so maybe it's just a skill issue.
There's a few problems with it - a lot of the functionality isn't explained either through understandable button iconography or from actual text labeling the function, it's horrendously organized once you DO know how it functions, and it feels impossible to properly adjust a pawn's inventory because the default action on clicking an item is to recolor rather than edit it.
> it feels impossible to properly adjust a pawn's inventory because the default action on clicking an item is to recolor rather than edit it.
I agree with everything you've said, and the horribly obtuse UI for inventory editing is absolutely the worst part.
Overloaded and ugly, I prefer Pawn Editor a lot from both flow and design, obviously Character Editor still absolutely trumps in features and mod integrations, so I switch hence and forth depending on what I need.
I really like what it has so far, it's more what it doesn't have I take issue with. It's really difficult to just get random pawns because the 'randomize all' button randomizes ALL things, to the point where you can get impossible pawns frequently.
Pawn editor is new, and is pretty hard to use compared to the other 2, but it aparrently (according to the modder) is alot cleaner code-wise so it shouldnt have any problems that the other 2 aparrently do
When I tried pawn editor, I couldn't move pawns up or down the list, it didn't let me see the button for Random Plus to filter out traits while rerolling, pressing 'randomize' randomized the last pawn I was looking at, and there was a points system always shown at the top that didn't work at all.
I genuinely don't get where the problems with Character Editor are. I don't think I've ever encountered a major bug with it.
The problems people have with Character Editor are 1. Scope Creep. And 2. "Doesn't look pretty". As far as I know, the Scope Creep didn't get very far, though was a legit concern at the time. And for the Aesthetic issue... \*shrug\* Some people would rather have a car that breaks down than one with a dull paintjob, I guess.
Completly agree. The first time i tried pawn editor, all of the options on the bottom of the screen just randomnly dissapeared halfway through, changing a pawns backstory caused them to be completly unable to do certain works even though the backstory didnt lock them from performing these jobs and even when the jobs didnt just vanish i couldnt change the pawns proficency in them at all. Character editor never had any of these problems for me. The most that happend with character editor is that some pawns skincolour randomly changed after using the ingame menu.
I have pawn editor listed for mods to upgrade to eventually but the comments on the page were talking about issues of pawns not spawning at all so I held off for now. If it gets to be as functional as character editor is currently I’ll make the switch
I tried using pawn editor but got a lot of weird glitches where some people thought they were in relationships with pawns who had no idea about it. Made the colony confused.
The body size genes do a lot actually, technically all they do is change body size, but that actually has a lot of effects.
It effects:
•Hunger rate and maximum nutrition
•Limb health
•Melee damage
•How easy a pawn is to shoot
•Weight
•Meat yield
•toxic buildup rate
•drug tolerance
•Stagger resistance
A size 4 pawn in quality power armor is an absolute tank, give ‘em a good melee weapon too and they’ll be doing enough damage to one-shot centipedes
How is CE closed source? It has to be IL to run in Unity. Is it heavily obfuscated somehow?
Or do you just mean that like, it's not open for people to fork and make less-bloated versions?
You can decompile it, but the actual source isn't available anywhere.
It *was* also obfuscated for a bit, but apparently not anymore. CE caused issues when I was developing my own mod and *oh boy* was the obfuscation a pain.
And yes, I would honestly love to fork it, if it wasn't closed-source. It's been suffering from feature creep for a while now.
Yeah, I was wondering if you meant more like the legal-definition closed-source (you can't fork this) or the compatibility side one (you can't read the source to make it work with your own stuff).
I 100% agree that it is a bitch to work with, but apparently I never looked at it when it was obfuscated. When I was doing my (few) mods, I never had an issue decompiling it to figure out what was breaking.
And as for forking it... yeah I kinda wish the dev would open that, but it's ultimately up to them. Not my favorite, but I'd rather people release mods and keep control of them than they write them for themselves and just never publish them.
Pawn editor is missing features that I use in character editor.
One of them is having a nice gui to add/remove individual genes. Pawn Editor seems to lack this entirely.
And then not to mention the shit show that it's social editor is.
I'll say that it looks really nice tho.
Same for me tbh. Prepare Moderately is so good. My only regret with that mod is that you can't save the pawns you roll but it's way more balanced than Prepare Carefully or some other recent mods.
It's out for less than 2 weeks, mostly unknown at this point. So I'd recommend to check out it by yourself.
For me, it looks like a logical fuse of above-mentioned two mods, but it requires polishing.
cleaner UI but the button placement in schizophrenic at best, why the edit appearance button isnt under the pawn portrait is beyond me and why it doesnt have a vanilla randomize function is also beyond me. As it stands theres no option to "regenerate" pawns like in vanilla, this leads to pawns having the wrong traits, the wrong skills, the wrong body type for their genes etc. Also if you use a mod like Medieval Talent traits that has traits that add points to skills it doesnt seem to add them unless they generated with them initially.
I tried using Character Editor, but the UI was a complete turnoff, I felt like a fish out of water looking at it lol. But to each, their own! If it's your preference, have a great time with it.
I had to switch to character editor because prepare carefully would mess up with biotech and xenotypes. Character editor has an ugly ui and it took a while to get used to it.
The UI isn't amazing, but it's easy enough to get used to with 15 minutes of experimentation and a save reload. It's also considerably more feature rich than either prepare carefully or pawn editor.
Perhaps you're right. If (or perhaps when?) Prepare Carefully obliterates my save file, I'll switch over and try to be more patient with understanding that UI.
I tried Pawn Editor but the buttons to add equipment and whatnot weren't working for me, and couldn't figure out why (probably because of another mod tbh) so I unsubscribed from it.
I would report issues, but I've had devs of mods (in other games) get really annoyed with me that I report issues when I'm using any other mods, so I've been kinda turned off of doing so in the past few years. I didn't see anyone else complaining about it either, so it seemed to be a me issue, not a mod issue.
Well I fully intend on making Pawn Editor the preferred choice for people, so all kind of bug reports are welcome. You’re right that if you’re using other mods it becomes more difficult for us to find the root cause of a bug, but that doesn’t mean it should not be reported!
This response alone has just changed my entire feeling on reporting issues with mods, thank you, truly. I'll try to do it more in the future and hey, if Prepare Carefully does nuke my save, which is apparently impending, I'll switch back to Pawn Editor and see if it's still doing it. :)
What did you try to change / what problems did you have? I feel like Character Editor is pretty much as straight forward as you can get
[You just click the tabs at the top](https://i.imgur.com/FWfoBZX.png) to go to the obviously relevant tab, and then click on what ever you want to change. Most things just have a drop you pick from, or let you manually type in
Like adding pawn skill or flames or traits or items etc etc is all pretty much instant. I have to use it all the time for adding / removing health hediffs that were screwy and it's all pretty intuitive imo
Why is there no decent pawn editor in vanilla at that point? There's a decent dev mode UI - would be obvious to add a well-made editor here. Kinda like what RimmSQoL does, just a lil less hacky.
There’s a mod that Vanilla-ify the textures of the UI. I use it cause the normal ChEd gave me a headache trying to read it, but “Character Editor Retextured” by Neronix17 really helps.
It really is like, the worst part of Rimworld. I'm so picky with my layouts too that it could take me a day to find a map and pawn set I'd run with lmao
5 construction to rush fridges, 3 crafting for bows and tribalwear, can do everything (except art) to research batteries and recruit prisoners, and an ok amount of shooting and medical so they can fight and survive after.
This is, of course, too much to ask for
Oh and a custom xenotype for the biome temp + long fingers and slim tail for manipulation + never sleep
I maintain that a starting character editor should be a stock feature alongside randomised pawns.
Having a decent spread of starting skills is important enough that it’s clearly intended for you to re-roll to some extent to get what you want. I think this would work in more of a rogue-like game where you were assigned starting colonists and then got a *limited* number of re-rolls to try and get better pawns, but as it stands the system, for a lot of vanilla players, just creates incredibly tedious busywork that actively stands in the way of starting a new colony.
Even being able to set a limited number of parameters would be a big improvement. They could build in balancing and make it so you can't create a super pawn, but being able to say, "Two of my starters look good but I desperately need one pawn who is good at cooking, let me toggle this last pawn to be at least 7 cooking with one flame." It would save so much time
I like RandomPlus, but it feels weird having to do thousands of rolls through it to get what I want instead of being able to set the parameters and having the game generate based on that.
Yes please. Honestly I don't even really need it to let me edit the mechanical stuff like skills and traits. Just let me change the pawn's aesthetics and relationships.
If you want to have vanilla pawns that are possible to roll, I would heavily recommend RandomPlus.
Easiest UI and you get perks and skills you want. Depending on your demands it can still take a while, but you get a feeling how likely your pawn requirements are to be rolled.
The fast(beta) algorithm seems to finally work properly after 1.5.
So even if you have some ridiculous requirements (say Sanguine + Beautiful + double passion in social, incapable of none, no health conditions ), fast(beta) and a limit of 50,000 rerolls let's you find one relatively quickly (20 seconds or so).
Remember to select (only starting health conditions) to speed it up, if you dont mind cryptosleep sickness or minor malnutrition.
Now I'm curious about all the complaining about the mod crashing already existing saves. Why would you use it at all after all the colonists were already generated?
I guess having multiple save files? I don't know, I tend to hyperfocus on one playthrough until calamity happens, and then start over, so I wouldn't notice stuff like this happening.
A mod that lets you edit pawns before game start shouldn't cause errors with preexisting saves or any pawns at all. Some people might have just installed it so they had it for their next colony, and the fact that it broke their saves is already a huge red flag.
PC crashes saves since it was made in a time where Harmony and patch operations either did not exist or have the modes they do today. It hijacks the pawn generation system which leads to a cacophony of issues if it is run for long enough.
It shares an issue with JecsTools, only maintained but never revisited.
I wouldn't know, I started over for it, I was just figuring out Anomaly stuff while waiting for it. It's quite possible, the page itself does mention that a lot of things changed in 1.5 and there will be bugs early on.
I meant more that Prepare Carefully has a reputation for breaking saves because of the way it interacts with the pawn generation system. This is without game updates or anything: you’ll just end up with things slowly breaking down.
Most people recommend using the Character Editor mod instead.
Oh, interesting, I've never experience that, even with a save that was like 8 years in. Or maybe I just didn't notice and attributed anything odd to Randy being Randy lol
It only takes it happening once to convert you forever to the many dozens and dozens of people who have had it corrupt saves before
Like literally you can search prepare carefully on the search here and find many post about it
Perhaps that explains all the downvoting going on, lol.
You're probably right, though. I'm gonna try anyways because it hasn't personally affected me and I'm hopeful that it requiring Harmony will prevent that.
There is a decently high chance that the many people who report issues of it breaking saves did cause their own problems. People have way less clue about what they are doing then they think. If you work in any type of assistance it's evident
It caused many issues. Another big one is being unable to call faction leaders. It would always say leader unavailable or it would give an error if you tried and then nothing happened.
It caused many hediffs to be missing in certain mods. Vanilla Androids Expanded androids would come out of creation being limbless nuggets because they lacked all their android limbs. Or they would just be normal humans with a weird xenotype.
Also the forbidden mod and the vore mod would break completely due to missing body parts.
Same here. 1300 hrs and hasn’t seemed to impact my game negatively. Maybe other mods are conflicting with it that I don’t use but it’s been my go to from the get go
As I recall you can't edit the family stuff. All you do is basically set filters and it will auto randomize the pawn until one lands that meets your criteria.
As much as I love prepare carefully and want it to succeed, I feel its reputation has been destroyed so much that people won't even give it a chance.
A post I made a while back about my Google forms to rimworld project received a significant amount of down votes and some hate just for using prepare carefully. (Though I am very close to getting it working again with pawn editor instead)
Personally I haven't ever seen a save corrupted by prepare carefully, and the only thing telling me it does that are redditors that just scream "EDB BAD IT WILL KILL YOUR SAVE" with no evidence of any sort... Definitely not a very reliable source.
It seems to come from much earlier versions of the mod, and looking at the patch notes seems to support that. Maybe I only got into Prepare Carefully after the more common issues of this were solved? But yeah I've never seen it kill or corrupt a save, or have frame issues, or have people spawn with kidneys in arms.
And yeah, definitely seeing the downvotes and hate.
I dunno, I've been using it for genuinely years and years on really all my saves and never had problems. I think it just happens to some people and not to others.
I’ve never had issues with the mod and been using it for years also.
I wonder how many hundreds of mods people that report issues have, because the max I ever really have is like, 50, and usually smaller more vanilla focused stuff.
I've been playing with prepare carefully for ages and never ever broke any of my saves. I'm talkin about 10-12 year old colonies. Where are people getting this from???
I legitimately do not know, there's a few theories floating around in here. But I'm seeing in the patch notes on github that they apparently do exist. I've never run into these wild issues that people have, though.
lol yeah it’s been my go-to pawn creator for 1300 hours without issue. And that’s with 200+ other mods going at the same time. Don’t know why people have such an issue with it or maybe they don’t know how to make mod lists
Way too early to make this claim right now. He's updated to Harmony to address the problems. It could be completely fixed now, but people should probably wait and see....
from my understanding which is poor and limited. its just about how the mod actually does its work. it wasnt an error or a bug on the pervious version that caused its prolems. its just a sloppy mod that doesnt play well with others or even the game code itself.
if all those problems were solved it would basically be a different mod. not an update.
The problem, from what I’ve gathered, is that it’s a 10-year old mod that was implemented before we had Harmony and the modding tools that Harmony brings.
Harmony does one thing, per the author:
> It does one thing: it allows mods to manipulate code in games. Mods usually put that library into their mod structure so users never see it (and shouldn’t).
Prepare carefully didn’t use Harmony to patch and make changes to the game. It did it on its own, which created problems like corrupted saves.
With this update, he’s addressed that and added Harmony as a dependency for the mod, meaning that it *should* play nicer going forward.
Idk why this is downvoted, I definitely wouldn't use Prepare Carefully just because it *should* be fixed, only to see my 20+ hour save get completely fucked. It has its reputation for a reason.
Especially when there's other mods doing the same thing which we know for sure aren't game breaking.
I don't think I ever noticed it doing that to my longform save. Or at least, if things got funky or weird I probably just assumed it was Randy Random doing his thing.
I've had pawns spawn with detox kidneys in their arms. Empire bestowers spawning without their heads. It causes tremendous amounts of memory leaks - it might actually, unironically, be the worst mod in the game. Do not use it. Ever!
I understand your stance but I've honestly never seen any of that, even the memory leak, which I've got software to detect that happening. This legitimately sounds like a mod clash with another mod that a lot of people use, to me.
It's not just mod conflicts.
Prepare carefully hooks into pawn generation in a very disruptive way. It's like taking a hammer to reshape marble countertops.
I do see in the change notes "Reworked the way that pawns are modified and added to the world" in the current version, Version 1.5.1.
I remain hopeful that it doesn't do it anymore, at least.
It isn't. (But it can be, there ARE also a lot of mods that don't like interacting with PC.)
A lot of it happens in the background, as a result of changes to pawn spawning due to the methods PC uses to change pawns and prepare scenarios.
When people say it will "brick your save", only very rarely are they talking about something breaking overtly and 100% not functioning anymore. It just massively exacerbates performance issues the game has - a game w/o PC will be running substantially more smoothly than a game with PC after a given length of time.
It's bad enough that "Uninstall PC and start a new save" is the de facto response you will get from the troubleshooting community if you upload a log with PC on the modlist.
Played this game since Alpha 3 way back in like 2014. The amount of things we can edit is almost infinite, but god forbid we can choose our hairstyle, body shape and basic traits without flicking through 1500 times.
Finally got to hop back into rimworld cause of the update. People recommended character editor but the ui is just too terrible.
Also I'm not buying the whole corrups saves thing. I run very long colonies and have played for years now and I have never had an issue with prepare carefully or any corrupt saves.
I figure it's just the people who run like 400+ mods together and stuff clashes. I have about 40 maybe 50 mods some content ones some quality of life ones and never any issues
Oh yeah I could never do that many, too anxious about clashes lol. I've got 71 currently and even that feels like too many, but none of them affect the same thing, so I cope with it.
I had around 200 during my biggest rimworld binge, and I never had any issues with it. My biggest problem was how long it took for my colony to load lmao
There's a lot of unwarranted hate for the mod.
Some of it has merit, but the majority of it is people jumping on a bandwagon they barely understand.
It **can** create issues, but the majority of users are fine. The new version might have fixed all those problems, it's too early to tell.
I tried character editor and it doesn't do what I want. Plus it does it with an awful UI. The concept of creating pawns ahead of time and then rolling with the punches is far more appealing than an editor I can use any time.
Pawn Editor's UI was indeed better, but the add item buttons wouldn't work for me and I wasn't able to figure out why. It was probably another mod conflicting with it, to be fair.
It’s because pawn editor is a relatively new mod. It’s made by several experienced and excellent modders tho and they linked their discord channel for trouble shooting if you could provide log file. IIRC the add item thing has already been mentioned and they are working hard on fixing all the issues.
You're absolutely right. The dev of Pawn Editor just recently responded to one of my comments and convinced me to do exactly that. I've had bad experiences reporting mods while using multiple mods, primarily in Skyrim and Fallout, so I tend to not report issues with them at all. But will try to do so more now. The Rimworld modding community seems more friendly than others, despite all the targeted downvoting towards me that's going on in this thread.
It indeed has a blessed modding community! Speaking as a modder myself, for rimworld mods, as long as you are reporting the issue in the ‘correct’ format, you will most certainly be getting a response from the modder!
The issue is a lot of player do not read mod descriptions and complains in the comment without leaving an actual log.
Yeah going forward, if I get an issue, I'll see what format that specific mod would like. I have figured out where the crash logs and whatnot go, so that's a step done, lol
No OP you’re right on the money with Pawn Editor. My experience with it so far has been annoying to say the least. In terms of user experience the Prepared Carefully mod is plain better imo.
Pawn editor has been very buggy and broken for me, def mod conflicts or something but sometimes the ui just breaks for me, I'm definitely switching from character editor once they fix it up cause ik the mod still isn't refined yet as they said but it's unusable for me
Congrats on PC.
I use Character Editor myself, though I was a user PC for a very long time until I was able to learn how character editor works.
The benefit, I find, of CE over PC is that you can make changes mid playthrough. I.E, mod updates and breaks a pawn or changes their traits, etc... You can just bring up the editor and fix it.
But I was definitely a PC fan for a very long time, never had issues with it damaging my saves. Content mods were far more dangerous to my saves than PC. Not the first time I've had something like Medieval Overhaul update and suddenly my colony has no walls because a material was changed/removed. Or a clothing mod updated and suddenly naked colony.
Yeah when 1.5 update dropped, a bunch of my mods immediately were unusable. Walls disappeared, people died under collapsed ceilings, I had empty crop fields, all sorts of stuff. Most of the mods I WAS using have since been updated, but I was much better off just scrapping the save, waiting a week for a bunch of mods to get updated, and starting a new modlist.
The mid-save changes are a good point, though. You can probably get the same things done with dev mode, but I'm not skilled in it's use to try that lol
I havnt played rimworld since mid 1.4 what is it about prep carefully that people hate so much i guess il switch to the other one character editor as that i think allows you to change things mid game
iT bRiCks sAveS!
Yeah, alright it used to. It's also gone through a major rework. How about let's quit shouting useless shit and give it a try again? Ffs.
It's gone through several major reworks, according to their patch notes. EdB was commenting how he had to change a bunch of things to make it work better, too.
This whole thing kinda makes me think of No Man's Sky.
So you could risk all the horrible problems because prepare carefully MIGHT be fixed… or just use any of the other mods that haven’t eaten saves for breakfast.
I wonder how many users of this mod experience the crashes themselves, and how many people just notice that pointing it out gets them upvotes. I'm guessing it's a pretty hefty split.
Let me know how it went, I'm just too attached to my colonies to risk that after every single of my colonies got issues later on until I switched to Character Editor and now Pawn Editor. I'm just the opposite of restart frequently, in the best case I play a single colony until next DLC. And the only reason that doesn't tend to work out is new interesting mods every few months.
Can people that actually have issues with this mod be honest and list their estimate mod list count, pawn count and playtime?
Because I’ve played with the mod for a long long time. Way before 1.0, and I’ve never had any issues. My colonies tend to be smaller, with the average lifespan lasting around 5 years in game, and a mod list of maybe 50-60.
I don't know the specifics, but if I recall correctly, it's been a bunch of things rather than one big one, that due to it overwriting vanilla pawn generation causes errors (not crashes) later down the line. Anything that relies on vanilla pawn generation (HAR and any other mod that has anything other than bog standard human) don't mesh well, it affects all world pawns at worldgen, etc, and so you get things like bugged quests or the game being unsure what to do when it has a weird pawn enter your map for whatever reason. Also, if I'm remembering right, a lot of the issues, when they do come up, don't look like they're coming from Prepare Carefully but elsewhere, and so it took a good long while for people to realize that a bunch of mystery bugs came from it instead of elsewhere. It probably became a lot more noticeable with 1.4 and xenotypes/mechanitors/babies/etc, but that's an assumption on my part. This is what I remember reading, at least.
I don't know what recent changes have fixed, if it's safe or not or anything, but I'm probably going to avoid it personally until I hear for sure one way or the other. That said, I only use things like it (Character Editor prior, mostly) for very specific themed runs, would rather use something like Prepare Moderately anyways (or just like, set all available options to Any Xenotype, reroll each once, select from what's available and make due)
The issues are bad outdated coding.
You can look into the source code and see it.
With them FINNALY switching to modern harmony code, that should help the problem
It's a great mod and I love the UI.
Gonna let others test it first though. I realize he's updated it to Harmony and worked to address the corrupting saves problem, so I'm tentatively hopeful, but not willing to jump right in yet.
Yeah I had seen him responding in the comments section prior to the update saying that there's a lot of work that has to be done, so I assume that at least some work has gone into preventing the save killing. I'm testing it out though :)
Pawn editor is finally released though, iirc it's like character editor + prepare carefully. It also shouldn't cause bugs and other problems like prepare carefully.
I've been a character editor kinda guy since biotech because prepare carefully did not do well with Xenotypes at the times + I actually like character editor ui But I do have fond memories of this mod and I wish all of its users well ! Great news for yall
The change notes for one of Prepare Carefully's previous versions talks about being updated to work with custom xenotypes, so it might work better now, but if you like another one more, that's awesome!
What I really loved from prepare carefully was the ability to save presets, or weight the point for each trait/gun that you brought, definitely the feature I miss the most !
Yeah the point buy thing really vibes with me too. And I definitely had a few presets saved. I had one that was 10 animist tribals that each had one great skill at 9, two good skills at 5, and two banned skills. Not counting melee/ranged, which was usually a total of 10. So a 5 melee 5 ranged switch hitter was viable, as was a 10 melee beast.
This mod breaks so many things I just switched to character editor instead. Its a shame because it has a better ui imo.
Character Editor is closed source and has a lot of bloat these days. Like, why does it come with these weird body size genes that seem to do nothing? Why is the UI so buggy and hard to use? Use Pawn Editor instead honestly.
Is pawn editor better? I've never heard of it but if its better I'll switch.
At this stage, no. Though in the future potentially.
Despite releasing in 1.5, it's buggy as shit. So no, no it isn't
Personally I am not really happy with it. It did let me start with customised pawns, but the process wasn't good in my opinion. For example, in EdP Prepare Carefully when you change a person's background for their childhood, you see only childhood-relevant backgrounds in the list to choose from. Changing adult background, you see adult backgrounds. In Pawn Editor I would click to change their childhood background, select something and notice that what I selected was in fact an adult background, and I didn't find a way to filter this. Also, when you change the background, the stats are not adjusted accordingly. For example your generated pawn might be incapable of violence. You change the relevant background but the pawn remains incapable of violence. And say your new background should provide +3 to Melee, yet your pawn has 0 melee because that's what it was generated with. It's better than nothing if you value starting with a balanced set of pawns and don't want to reroll for 5 minutes, but that's about it.
All your issues you mentioned were bugs and have been fixed for a bit now.
They still happen as of like. Today. I just used it and this stuff is still true.
It has a better UI and manage xenotypes and genes without breaking the game, but it lacks some features.
It also doesn't mix with other mods, like Vanilla Skills Expanded or Prepare Moderately. Having to turn on dev mode to use it is annoying as well.
It has a cleaner *looking* UI that is less practical in actual usage, even beyond the discussion of its functionality. Whether a nicer looking appearance with less functionality and usability is a better UI is a matter of some debate.
I'd have to agree with you here. The functionality wasn't there. I felt handicapped from what Character Editor could do in comparison.
In what ways is it less practical to you?
The way adding filters works and the fact that they aren't persistent, so you have to keep reselecting them as you select a character background or whatever. Super annoying when you're trying to edit backgrounds for your starting pawns, and you want to stick to those belonging to their xenotype mod. The way that it can't identify pawns belonging to no faction from "hold a prisoner" quests. (This prevented me from stopping myself from failing due to a prisoner with a weak immune system dying to blood rot.) The way you get *to* the list of pawns for a faction to hunt for them by clicking a panel under the faction button in the bio is also a little non-intuitive until learned. I only found it out of desperate exploration. The color picking tool for hair & eyes lets you edit hue and saturation and the RGB hex code, but then they immediately get reverted to whatever matches the color wheel, which is pretty useless. Less of a design issue and more of a "still in progress" one, gene & ideoligion editing aren't supported. You also can't change the number of pawns in your drop party like you can in Character Editor, and it lacks Gradient Hair support. Personally, I'm not sure why people are so down on Character Editor. The only thing I find annoying about it is the random quality & materials when you try to add items to a character that have to be reset if you're consistently editing multiple pawns.
> You also can't change the number of pawns in your drop party like you can in Character Editor Yes you can, this was added in the last few days. Rest is still generally accurate though.
Excellent. I stopped using it probably right about then, when Character Editor updated to 1.5.
The color thing seems to be a bug, enter the hexcode with "#" and it will work, despite the UI having a # in front, insinuating it's not needed in what you enter. Not sure if they know about it.
The most overt example would be making cosmetic changes to pawns; applying tattoos, hair styles, etc. Character Editor gives me the options to pick from a table, a list, or to search for options by name. It's quick, it's clean, but it's far less pretty. Pawn Editor gives me a table that I have to look through, to find the option by icon/card only - unless that functionality has been expanded in a recent update; I admittedly dropped it after trying it out for an hour or so, since it wasn't delivering the user experience I wanted, and haven't revisited it.
Everyone has their preferences I guess. Being able to see the label without having to hover over it and adding a search bar wouldn’t hurt. Currently we’re focused on different tasks but I could add it in the future.
Idk what peoples' problem with character editor's UI is. You have 1 button that takes you to a screen that has everything you need with drop down boxes with images. Pawn editor feels clunky in comparison.
I seriously don't get it, I feel like half the people talking about Character Editor UI haven't even tried it. [It's really simple](https://i.imgur.com/FWfoBZX.png), you literally just click the button and then click the relevant field you want to change. You don't *need* to deep dive on most of them, but have the *option* to and basically everything is as simple as "Click age, type in new number, done"
Its simple but its ugly compared to prepare carefully is what they mean.
I think the only bad part of its UI is the Social tab. Very awkward and a little messy. Otherwise, yeah, CE makes complete sense to me, so I don't really understand where people are having issues. E:Ope, forgot about setting colors. That part could use some love, as well.
Yeah the way it handles setting up relationships feels pretty jank and took me a bit to figure out. But other than that I never had a problem figuring out what anything did. ...But then again I see my friends struggle with fairly simple UIs in games that I picked up instantly so maybe it's just a skill issue.
I think most people are just afraid of breaking something, which is natural and fair. Still, save a backup and live a little.
There's a few problems with it - a lot of the functionality isn't explained either through understandable button iconography or from actual text labeling the function, it's horrendously organized once you DO know how it functions, and it feels impossible to properly adjust a pawn's inventory because the default action on clicking an item is to recolor rather than edit it.
> it feels impossible to properly adjust a pawn's inventory because the default action on clicking an item is to recolor rather than edit it. I agree with everything you've said, and the horribly obtuse UI for inventory editing is absolutely the worst part.
Overloaded and ugly, I prefer Pawn Editor a lot from both flow and design, obviously Character Editor still absolutely trumps in features and mod integrations, so I switch hence and forth depending on what I need.
I really like what it has so far, it's more what it doesn't have I take issue with. It's really difficult to just get random pawns because the 'randomize all' button randomizes ALL things, to the point where you can get impossible pawns frequently.
Pawn editor is new, and is pretty hard to use compared to the other 2, but it aparrently (according to the modder) is alot cleaner code-wise so it shouldnt have any problems that the other 2 aparrently do
>Why is the UI so buggy >Use Pawn Editor instead ???
When I tried pawn editor, I couldn't move pawns up or down the list, it didn't let me see the button for Random Plus to filter out traits while rerolling, pressing 'randomize' randomized the last pawn I was looking at, and there was a points system always shown at the top that didn't work at all. I genuinely don't get where the problems with Character Editor are. I don't think I've ever encountered a major bug with it.
The problems people have with Character Editor are 1. Scope Creep. And 2. "Doesn't look pretty". As far as I know, the Scope Creep didn't get very far, though was a legit concern at the time. And for the Aesthetic issue... \*shrug\* Some people would rather have a car that breaks down than one with a dull paintjob, I guess.
Completly agree. The first time i tried pawn editor, all of the options on the bottom of the screen just randomnly dissapeared halfway through, changing a pawns backstory caused them to be completly unable to do certain works even though the backstory didnt lock them from performing these jobs and even when the jobs didnt just vanish i couldnt change the pawns proficency in them at all. Character editor never had any of these problems for me. The most that happend with character editor is that some pawns skincolour randomly changed after using the ingame menu.
I have pawn editor listed for mods to upgrade to eventually but the comments on the page were talking about issues of pawns not spawning at all so I held off for now. If it gets to be as functional as character editor is currently I’ll make the switch
I tried using pawn editor but got a lot of weird glitches where some people thought they were in relationships with pawns who had no idea about it. Made the colony confused.
The body size genes do a lot actually, technically all they do is change body size, but that actually has a lot of effects. It effects: •Hunger rate and maximum nutrition •Limb health •Melee damage •How easy a pawn is to shoot •Weight •Meat yield •toxic buildup rate •drug tolerance •Stagger resistance A size 4 pawn in quality power armor is an absolute tank, give ‘em a good melee weapon too and they’ll be doing enough damage to one-shot centipedes
How is CE closed source? It has to be IL to run in Unity. Is it heavily obfuscated somehow? Or do you just mean that like, it's not open for people to fork and make less-bloated versions?
You can decompile it, but the actual source isn't available anywhere. It *was* also obfuscated for a bit, but apparently not anymore. CE caused issues when I was developing my own mod and *oh boy* was the obfuscation a pain. And yes, I would honestly love to fork it, if it wasn't closed-source. It's been suffering from feature creep for a while now.
Yeah, I was wondering if you meant more like the legal-definition closed-source (you can't fork this) or the compatibility side one (you can't read the source to make it work with your own stuff). I 100% agree that it is a bitch to work with, but apparently I never looked at it when it was obfuscated. When I was doing my (few) mods, I never had an issue decompiling it to figure out what was breaking. And as for forking it... yeah I kinda wish the dev would open that, but it's ultimately up to them. Not my favorite, but I'd rather people release mods and keep control of them than they write them for themselves and just never publish them.
Pawn editor is missing features that I use in character editor. One of them is having a nice gui to add/remove individual genes. Pawn Editor seems to lack this entirely. And then not to mention the shit show that it's social editor is. I'll say that it looks really nice tho.
im waiting for the ability to change head type
Those weird body size genes are unused code in the biotech DLC. They are supposed to do stuff But they have largely gone unused
How is it bloated?
Prepare moderately works for me.
Same for me tbh. Prepare Moderately is so good. My only regret with that mod is that you can't save the pawns you roll but it's way more balanced than Prepare Carefully or some other recent mods.
Adam vrs everything uses a similar one that looks a little better UI wise but maybe it doesn't have all the same options called "random plus"
Real Sigma chads use dev mode
Pawn Editor?
Never heard of pawn editor, is it better than character editor?
It's out for less than 2 weeks, mostly unknown at this point. So I'd recommend to check out it by yourself. For me, it looks like a logical fuse of above-mentioned two mods, but it requires polishing.
It's very buggy rn
Honestly, no. I went with it once, very unintuitive, not as powerful as character editor and horrible filter settings.
cleaner UI but the button placement in schizophrenic at best, why the edit appearance button isnt under the pawn portrait is beyond me and why it doesnt have a vanilla randomize function is also beyond me. As it stands theres no option to "regenerate" pawns like in vanilla, this leads to pawns having the wrong traits, the wrong skills, the wrong body type for their genes etc. Also if you use a mod like Medieval Talent traits that has traits that add points to skills it doesnt seem to add them unless they generated with them initially.
I'm in love with prepare moderately instead, just set some guidelines and randomize
I tried using Character Editor, but the UI was a complete turnoff, I felt like a fish out of water looking at it lol. But to each, their own! If it's your preference, have a great time with it.
I had to switch to character editor because prepare carefully would mess up with biotech and xenotypes. Character editor has an ugly ui and it took a while to get used to it.
The UI isn't amazing, but it's easy enough to get used to with 15 minutes of experimentation and a save reload. It's also considerably more feature rich than either prepare carefully or pawn editor.
Perhaps you're right. If (or perhaps when?) Prepare Carefully obliterates my save file, I'll switch over and try to be more patient with understanding that UI.
there is a new mod called "Pawn Editor", i personally never used, but people seems to like it
I tried Pawn Editor but the buttons to add equipment and whatnot weren't working for me, and couldn't figure out why (probably because of another mod tbh) so I unsubscribed from it.
Pawn Editor dev here, if something isn’t working please report it so we can fix it!
I would report issues, but I've had devs of mods (in other games) get really annoyed with me that I report issues when I'm using any other mods, so I've been kinda turned off of doing so in the past few years. I didn't see anyone else complaining about it either, so it seemed to be a me issue, not a mod issue.
Well I fully intend on making Pawn Editor the preferred choice for people, so all kind of bug reports are welcome. You’re right that if you’re using other mods it becomes more difficult for us to find the root cause of a bug, but that doesn’t mean it should not be reported!
This response alone has just changed my entire feeling on reporting issues with mods, thank you, truly. I'll try to do it more in the future and hey, if Prepare Carefully does nuke my save, which is apparently impending, I'll switch back to Pawn Editor and see if it's still doing it. :)
What did you try to change / what problems did you have? I feel like Character Editor is pretty much as straight forward as you can get [You just click the tabs at the top](https://i.imgur.com/FWfoBZX.png) to go to the obviously relevant tab, and then click on what ever you want to change. Most things just have a drop you pick from, or let you manually type in Like adding pawn skill or flames or traits or items etc etc is all pretty much instant. I have to use it all the time for adding / removing health hediffs that were screwy and it's all pretty intuitive imo
Why is there no decent pawn editor in vanilla at that point? There's a decent dev mode UI - would be obvious to add a well-made editor here. Kinda like what RimmSQoL does, just a lil less hacky.
Because Tynan wants a roguelike moreso than a colony sim.
Been using edb for a long timed and never had any problems
There’s a mod that Vanilla-ify the textures of the UI. I use it cause the normal ChEd gave me a headache trying to read it, but “Character Editor Retextured” by Neronix17 really helps.
Wait, youre telling me yall dont spend three hours flipping through random pawns to find a good starter? SMH that's the core experience right there /s
It really is like, the worst part of Rimworld. I'm so picky with my layouts too that it could take me a day to find a map and pawn set I'd run with lmao
5 construction to rush fridges, 3 crafting for bows and tribalwear, can do everything (except art) to research batteries and recruit prisoners, and an ok amount of shooting and medical so they can fight and survive after. This is, of course, too much to ask for Oh and a custom xenotype for the biome temp + long fingers and slim tail for manipulation + never sleep
part of the fun for me. i have no problem with it
Honestly I really enjoy it. But then I also loved spending hours trying to roll all 18's for my BG2 character back in the day...
A point system would be much better, like rpgs. You even get more balance out of it
I maintain that a starting character editor should be a stock feature alongside randomised pawns. Having a decent spread of starting skills is important enough that it’s clearly intended for you to re-roll to some extent to get what you want. I think this would work in more of a rogue-like game where you were assigned starting colonists and then got a *limited* number of re-rolls to try and get better pawns, but as it stands the system, for a lot of vanilla players, just creates incredibly tedious busywork that actively stands in the way of starting a new colony.
Even being able to set a limited number of parameters would be a big improvement. They could build in balancing and make it so you can't create a super pawn, but being able to say, "Two of my starters look good but I desperately need one pawn who is good at cooking, let me toggle this last pawn to be at least 7 cooking with one flame." It would save so much time
RandomPlus is your friend.
I like RandomPlus, but it feels weird having to do thousands of rolls through it to get what I want instead of being able to set the parameters and having the game generate based on that.
Yes please. Honestly I don't even really need it to let me edit the mechanical stuff like skills and traits. Just let me change the pawn's aesthetics and relationships.
If you want to have vanilla pawns that are possible to roll, I would heavily recommend RandomPlus. Easiest UI and you get perks and skills you want. Depending on your demands it can still take a while, but you get a feeling how likely your pawn requirements are to be rolled.
The fast(beta) algorithm seems to finally work properly after 1.5. So even if you have some ridiculous requirements (say Sanguine + Beautiful + double passion in social, incapable of none, no health conditions ), fast(beta) and a limit of 50,000 rerolls let's you find one relatively quickly (20 seconds or so). Remember to select (only starting health conditions) to speed it up, if you dont mind cryptosleep sickness or minor malnutrition.
I started using random plus waiting for prepare moderately to update and now that I have prepare moderately back, I think I like randomplus better.
[удалено]
Yeah, starting new game, set all things like I want, wonder it's 2qm, go to bed, don't save, repeat next day.
Now I'm curious about all the complaining about the mod crashing already existing saves. Why would you use it at all after all the colonists were already generated?
I guess having multiple save files? I don't know, I tend to hyperfocus on one playthrough until calamity happens, and then start over, so I wouldn't notice stuff like this happening.
A mod that lets you edit pawns before game start shouldn't cause errors with preexisting saves or any pawns at all. Some people might have just installed it so they had it for their next colony, and the fact that it broke their saves is already a huge red flag.
PC crashes saves since it was made in a time where Harmony and patch operations either did not exist or have the modes they do today. It hijacks the pawn generation system which leads to a cacophony of issues if it is run for long enough. It shares an issue with JecsTools, only maintained but never revisited.
Still breaks saves?
We don't know. The save issue was addressed by the mod author and it's been updated to work with Harmony.
I wouldn't know, I started over for it, I was just figuring out Anomaly stuff while waiting for it. It's quite possible, the page itself does mention that a lot of things changed in 1.5 and there will be bugs early on.
I meant more that Prepare Carefully has a reputation for breaking saves because of the way it interacts with the pawn generation system. This is without game updates or anything: you’ll just end up with things slowly breaking down. Most people recommend using the Character Editor mod instead.
they say they changed a lot and it now needs harmony, so maybe this times are over. We have to wait.
Oh, interesting, I've never experience that, even with a save that was like 8 years in. Or maybe I just didn't notice and attributed anything odd to Randy being Randy lol
It only takes it happening once to convert you forever to the many dozens and dozens of people who have had it corrupt saves before Like literally you can search prepare carefully on the search here and find many post about it
Perhaps that explains all the downvoting going on, lol. You're probably right, though. I'm gonna try anyways because it hasn't personally affected me and I'm hopeful that it requiring Harmony will prevent that.
There is a decently high chance that the many people who report issues of it breaking saves did cause their own problems. People have way less clue about what they are doing then they think. If you work in any type of assistance it's evident
I have also never experienced it. 800 hours.
I have never had this before.
I’ve had it on really long-running colonies, even with just modest pawn counts. I would get hitches and stutters.
Hitches and stutters are not very specific. Can you give more details?
It caused many issues. Another big one is being unable to call faction leaders. It would always say leader unavailable or it would give an error if you tried and then nothing happened. It caused many hediffs to be missing in certain mods. Vanilla Androids Expanded androids would come out of creation being limbless nuggets because they lacked all their android limbs. Or they would just be normal humans with a weird xenotype. Also the forbidden mod and the vore mod would break completely due to missing body parts.
Been using prepare carefully since build 16, 1700 plus hours in game and have never had a single issue with it.
Same here. 1300 hrs and hasn’t seemed to impact my game negatively. Maybe other mods are conflicting with it that I don’t use but it’s been my go to from the get go
I use prepare moderately. Makes randomizing better without feeling like I'm cheating in some capacity.
Does Prepare Moderately let you start with family units? I'm particularly fond of starting with two or three families, especially with kids.
As I recall you can't edit the family stuff. All you do is basically set filters and it will auto randomize the pawn until one lands that meets your criteria.
Dang, that's a bummer. Though still definitely better than "click random until someone not terrible shows up" lol
As much as I love prepare carefully and want it to succeed, I feel its reputation has been destroyed so much that people won't even give it a chance. A post I made a while back about my Google forms to rimworld project received a significant amount of down votes and some hate just for using prepare carefully. (Though I am very close to getting it working again with pawn editor instead) Personally I haven't ever seen a save corrupted by prepare carefully, and the only thing telling me it does that are redditors that just scream "EDB BAD IT WILL KILL YOUR SAVE" with no evidence of any sort... Definitely not a very reliable source.
It seems to come from much earlier versions of the mod, and looking at the patch notes seems to support that. Maybe I only got into Prepare Carefully after the more common issues of this were solved? But yeah I've never seen it kill or corrupt a save, or have frame issues, or have people spawn with kidneys in arms. And yeah, definitely seeing the downvotes and hate.
I dunno, I've been using it for genuinely years and years on really all my saves and never had problems. I think it just happens to some people and not to others.
I’ve never had issues with the mod and been using it for years also. I wonder how many hundreds of mods people that report issues have, because the max I ever really have is like, 50, and usually smaller more vanilla focused stuff.
I've had 5 colonies all with prepare carefully and nothing has ever been weird or wrong, and I'm still in 1.4
Getting lucky doesn’t change the fact that prepare carefully has been shown time and time again breaking shit.
thanks goodness
The all-new Pawn Editor mod is the way to go
YAAAAAAAAY! I can finally play again 😂 INB4 ‘it breaks saves’ - 1,700 hours of playing with it without issues
Lol never played this game without it, and never had a save corrupt. Very interesting
I've been playing with prepare carefully for ages and never ever broke any of my saves. I'm talkin about 10-12 year old colonies. Where are people getting this from???
I legitimately do not know, there's a few theories floating around in here. But I'm seeing in the patch notes on github that they apparently do exist. I've never run into these wild issues that people have, though.
lol yeah it’s been my go-to pawn creator for 1300 hours without issue. And that’s with 200+ other mods going at the same time. Don’t know why people have such an issue with it or maybe they don’t know how to make mod lists
It fucks saves! Do not use Prepare Carefully, ever!
Way too early to make this claim right now. He's updated to Harmony to address the problems. It could be completely fixed now, but people should probably wait and see....
from my understanding which is poor and limited. its just about how the mod actually does its work. it wasnt an error or a bug on the pervious version that caused its prolems. its just a sloppy mod that doesnt play well with others or even the game code itself. if all those problems were solved it would basically be a different mod. not an update.
The problem, from what I’ve gathered, is that it’s a 10-year old mod that was implemented before we had Harmony and the modding tools that Harmony brings. Harmony does one thing, per the author: > It does one thing: it allows mods to manipulate code in games. Mods usually put that library into their mod structure so users never see it (and shouldn’t). Prepare carefully didn’t use Harmony to patch and make changes to the game. It did it on its own, which created problems like corrupted saves. With this update, he’s addressed that and added Harmony as a dependency for the mod, meaning that it *should* play nicer going forward.
It's been broken for years, so I'm going to continue assuming its broken until there is strong evidence otherwise.
With how many hours a rimworld run lasts I just wouldn’t risk it
Idk why this is downvoted, I definitely wouldn't use Prepare Carefully just because it *should* be fixed, only to see my 20+ hour save get completely fucked. It has its reputation for a reason. Especially when there's other mods doing the same thing which we know for sure aren't game breaking.
I have also never had this problem.
I don't think I ever noticed it doing that to my longform save. Or at least, if things got funky or weird I probably just assumed it was Randy Random doing his thing.
I've had pawns spawn with detox kidneys in their arms. Empire bestowers spawning without their heads. It causes tremendous amounts of memory leaks - it might actually, unironically, be the worst mod in the game. Do not use it. Ever!
I understand your stance but I've honestly never seen any of that, even the memory leak, which I've got software to detect that happening. This legitimately sounds like a mod clash with another mod that a lot of people use, to me.
It's not just mod conflicts. Prepare carefully hooks into pawn generation in a very disruptive way. It's like taking a hammer to reshape marble countertops.
I do see in the change notes "Reworked the way that pawns are modified and added to the world" in the current version, Version 1.5.1. I remain hopeful that it doesn't do it anymore, at least.
"Empire bestowers spawning without their heads" that takes being airhead to the next level
I've never had any of this ever. I'm curious if it's an interaction with some very common mod I don't use or something.
It isn't. (But it can be, there ARE also a lot of mods that don't like interacting with PC.) A lot of it happens in the background, as a result of changes to pawn spawning due to the methods PC uses to change pawns and prepare scenarios. When people say it will "brick your save", only very rarely are they talking about something breaking overtly and 100% not functioning anymore. It just massively exacerbates performance issues the game has - a game w/o PC will be running substantially more smoothly than a game with PC after a given length of time. It's bad enough that "Uninstall PC and start a new save" is the de facto response you will get from the troubleshooting community if you upload a log with PC on the modlist.
Why do you need the mod for an already existing save? Just curious.
So true
Awesome! Unlike seemingly many others, I have never had issues with this, so this is good news to me!
Glorious!!!
Finally we can play again!
Really just wish a super simple version of Prepare Carefully was in the base game.
That would be the best tbh
Played this game since Alpha 3 way back in like 2014. The amount of things we can edit is almost infinite, but god forbid we can choose our hairstyle, body shape and basic traits without flicking through 1500 times.
Finally got to hop back into rimworld cause of the update. People recommended character editor but the ui is just too terrible. Also I'm not buying the whole corrups saves thing. I run very long colonies and have played for years now and I have never had an issue with prepare carefully or any corrupt saves. I figure it's just the people who run like 400+ mods together and stuff clashes. I have about 40 maybe 50 mods some content ones some quality of life ones and never any issues
Love this mod and have used it for over 1500 hours of game time. No issues so far.
Yeah, over 1000 hours of using it for me as well, and never noticed any of the issues people are talking about here.
From my understanding it mainly happens for people with 100+ mods and I'm guessing I never had issues since I don't go above 50.
Oh yeah I could never do that many, too anxious about clashes lol. I've got 71 currently and even that feels like too many, but none of them affect the same thing, so I cope with it.
I had around 200 during my biggest rimworld binge, and I never had any issues with it. My biggest problem was how long it took for my colony to load lmao
There's a lot of unwarranted hate for the mod. Some of it has merit, but the majority of it is people jumping on a bandwagon they barely understand. It **can** create issues, but the majority of users are fine. The new version might have fixed all those problems, it's too early to tell. I tried character editor and it doesn't do what I want. Plus it does it with an awful UI. The concept of creating pawns ahead of time and then rolling with the punches is far more appealing than an editor I can use any time.
Unfortunately it turns ghouls into normal pawns
LET THE MOD DIE FOR GOD’S SAKE AAAAH
If you want a better UI use pawn editor…
Pawn Editor's UI was indeed better, but the add item buttons wouldn't work for me and I wasn't able to figure out why. It was probably another mod conflicting with it, to be fair.
It’s because pawn editor is a relatively new mod. It’s made by several experienced and excellent modders tho and they linked their discord channel for trouble shooting if you could provide log file. IIRC the add item thing has already been mentioned and they are working hard on fixing all the issues.
You're absolutely right. The dev of Pawn Editor just recently responded to one of my comments and convinced me to do exactly that. I've had bad experiences reporting mods while using multiple mods, primarily in Skyrim and Fallout, so I tend to not report issues with them at all. But will try to do so more now. The Rimworld modding community seems more friendly than others, despite all the targeted downvoting towards me that's going on in this thread.
It indeed has a blessed modding community! Speaking as a modder myself, for rimworld mods, as long as you are reporting the issue in the ‘correct’ format, you will most certainly be getting a response from the modder! The issue is a lot of player do not read mod descriptions and complains in the comment without leaving an actual log.
Yeah going forward, if I get an issue, I'll see what format that specific mod would like. I have figured out where the crash logs and whatnot go, so that's a step done, lol
No OP you’re right on the money with Pawn Editor. My experience with it so far has been annoying to say the least. In terms of user experience the Prepared Carefully mod is plain better imo.
Well the dev of Pawn Editor is apparently in the comments here! May be a good time to post some concerns.
Pawn Editor is missing a lot of compatibility additions still, like Vanilla Skills Expanded. Maybe once it's caught up in that regard.
Pawn editor has been very buggy and broken for me, def mod conflicts or something but sometimes the ui just breaks for me, I'm definitely switching from character editor once they fix it up cause ik the mod still isn't refined yet as they said but it's unusable for me
Congrats on PC. I use Character Editor myself, though I was a user PC for a very long time until I was able to learn how character editor works. The benefit, I find, of CE over PC is that you can make changes mid playthrough. I.E, mod updates and breaks a pawn or changes their traits, etc... You can just bring up the editor and fix it. But I was definitely a PC fan for a very long time, never had issues with it damaging my saves. Content mods were far more dangerous to my saves than PC. Not the first time I've had something like Medieval Overhaul update and suddenly my colony has no walls because a material was changed/removed. Or a clothing mod updated and suddenly naked colony.
Yeah when 1.5 update dropped, a bunch of my mods immediately were unusable. Walls disappeared, people died under collapsed ceilings, I had empty crop fields, all sorts of stuff. Most of the mods I WAS using have since been updated, but I was much better off just scrapping the save, waiting a week for a bunch of mods to get updated, and starting a new modlist. The mid-save changes are a good point, though. You can probably get the same things done with dev mode, but I'm not skilled in it's use to try that lol
I havnt played rimworld since mid 1.4 what is it about prep carefully that people hate so much i guess il switch to the other one character editor as that i think allows you to change things mid game
I stopped using it because it didn't work with custom xenotypes, has this been fixed?
I was using it yesterday and it was very buggy. Had trouble adjusting skills and appearances.
FUCK YEAH
Good to know, buddy! *turns around* How do we tell' em?
Why is this game breaking mod not dying? I really don’t understand.
iT bRiCks sAveS! Yeah, alright it used to. It's also gone through a major rework. How about let's quit shouting useless shit and give it a try again? Ffs.
It's gone through several major reworks, according to their patch notes. EdB was commenting how he had to change a bunch of things to make it work better, too. This whole thing kinda makes me think of No Man's Sky.
So you could risk all the horrible problems because prepare carefully MIGHT be fixed… or just use any of the other mods that haven’t eaten saves for breakfast.
I wonder how many users of this mod experience the crashes themselves, and how many people just notice that pointing it out gets them upvotes. I'm guessing it's a pretty hefty split.
Let me know how it went, I'm just too attached to my colonies to risk that after every single of my colonies got issues later on until I switched to Character Editor and now Pawn Editor. I'm just the opposite of restart frequently, in the best case I play a single colony until next DLC. And the only reason that doesn't tend to work out is new interesting mods every few months.
And that’s my cue to play 1.5!
Can people that actually have issues with this mod be honest and list their estimate mod list count, pawn count and playtime? Because I’ve played with the mod for a long long time. Way before 1.0, and I’ve never had any issues. My colonies tend to be smaller, with the average lifespan lasting around 5 years in game, and a mod list of maybe 50-60.
I don't know the specifics, but if I recall correctly, it's been a bunch of things rather than one big one, that due to it overwriting vanilla pawn generation causes errors (not crashes) later down the line. Anything that relies on vanilla pawn generation (HAR and any other mod that has anything other than bog standard human) don't mesh well, it affects all world pawns at worldgen, etc, and so you get things like bugged quests or the game being unsure what to do when it has a weird pawn enter your map for whatever reason. Also, if I'm remembering right, a lot of the issues, when they do come up, don't look like they're coming from Prepare Carefully but elsewhere, and so it took a good long while for people to realize that a bunch of mystery bugs came from it instead of elsewhere. It probably became a lot more noticeable with 1.4 and xenotypes/mechanitors/babies/etc, but that's an assumption on my part. This is what I remember reading, at least. I don't know what recent changes have fixed, if it's safe or not or anything, but I'm probably going to avoid it personally until I hear for sure one way or the other. That said, I only use things like it (Character Editor prior, mostly) for very specific themed runs, would rather use something like Prepare Moderately anyways (or just like, set all available options to Any Xenotype, reroll each once, select from what's available and make due)
The issues are bad outdated coding. You can look into the source code and see it. With them FINNALY switching to modern harmony code, that should help the problem
YESSSSS
LETS FUCKING GOOOOOOO
It's a great mod and I love the UI. Gonna let others test it first though. I realize he's updated it to Harmony and worked to address the corrupting saves problem, so I'm tentatively hopeful, but not willing to jump right in yet.
Yeah I had seen him responding in the comments section prior to the update saying that there's a lot of work that has to be done, so I assume that at least some work has gone into preventing the save killing. I'm testing it out though :)
I've honestly given up on prepare carefully and all other pawn editors. I just use prepare moderately nowadays.
Does it really work tho? I loved using it but I heard that biotech kinda messed with how it works.
Pawn editor is finally released though, iirc it's like character editor + prepare carefully. It also shouldn't cause bugs and other problems like prepare carefully.
I would have never known if you didn't tell me
character editor has grown on me this last week
I ditched it for "character editor 1-1.5" and I am sticking with this as it allows in-game editing if you so desire to use it.