Can I revive a kerbal?

[MarKu]

Hello,
I lost Jebediah Kerman on a mission. (K.I.A.) Now I wanted to ask if I can somehow revive Jebediah via a cheat/ command? Would it be possible. Or is there another option? thank you
Greetings MarKu

[Entropian]

I think the "Respawn Lost Crew" setting respawns M.I.A. kerbals, but I'm not sure about K.I.A. kerbals.  Try enabling that setting.

[bewing]

Once they are KIA they are gone. You can create new kerbals through the cheat menu (Alt-F12), but the game doesn't like creating multiple kerbals with the same name -- so you might need to alter the name a bit.

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

You can 'revive' Kerbals the hacky way by opening up a save file, finding the dead Kerbal(s) and changing their status to 'Available' rather than Dead/KIA/whatever it is dead Kerbals are listed as.

[MarKu]

26 minutes ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

You can 'revive' Kerbals the hacky way by opening up a save file, finding the dead Kerbal(s) and changing their status to 'Available' rather than Dead/KIA/whatever it is dead Kerbals are listed as.

 Could you please help me find the file? Would love to try the way.

[Streetwind]

...\Kerbal Space Program\saves\yoursavegamename\persistent.sfs

After you have made the changes and loaded into your game, you might also want to press F5 once. This will overwrite any quicksave you have previously made, because loading an old quicksave would revert the changes you have made by hand.

[jimmymcgoochie]

2 hours ago, MarKu said:

 Could you please help me find the file? Would love to try the way.

1. Inside the KSP directory there's a folder called saves. Inside that there are a number of folders and one of those will have the same name as your save game (you can check the name by pressing escape in flight, the name of the save is displayed on the pause menu; alternatively you can see it when you open the game up and select 'resume saved').
2. Open that folder, copy the file called persistent.sfs and rename it to something else (e.g. edited.sfs).
3. Open up the new file (edited.sfs) in a text editor- notepad can work if the file is fairly small but something like notepad++ or VScode is better as they can deal with larger files and do more edit-y things- and press Ctrl+F to do a search.
4. Search for either KERBAL (all caps) or 'name = Jebediah Kerman' (without the quote marks, I added those to make it clearer that you should search for the whole thing) and find the section that says this:

   Quote

   KERBAL
           {
               name = Jebediah Kerman

    

5. Scroll down a bit to find the parameter 'state', this will be something like state = Dead or state = KIA. (I'm not sure exactly what it will say as I don't have any dead Kerbals in my current save game)

6. Change the state to Available (state = Available, capital A is important!) and save the changes to the file.

7. In KSP, click 'Load save' and then pick the edited file (edited.sfs in this example) and load it up. Jeb should now appear in the Astronaut Complex as available to be assigned and you should be able to put him in a plane/rocket as normal.

 

Spoiler

Don't read this unless the above steps don't work properly, it goes a bit deeper than will probably be necessary.

Spoiler

On the off chance that doesn't quite do the trick- something doesn't work right when assigning crew, Jeb doesn't load into rockets/planes properly etc.- you might have to edit the flight logs which are a bit further down in Jeb's information in the save file.
You're looking for an event called something like 'Die' or 'KIA' with a number before it (e.g. 34 = Die/KIA) and will be under either CAREER_LOG or FLIGHT_LOG.

If it's in CAREER_LOG then look for this:

Quote

            CAREER_LOG
            {
                flight = 34

Find the information for the last flight, example below: 

Quote

                34 = Flight,Kerbin
                34 = Suborbit,Kerbin
                34 = Orbit,Kerbin
                34 = Land,Kerbin
                34 = Recover

If the last entry is Die/KIA/similar then you need to delete every entry from that flight from the log and change the value in flight to be one less (in this case, flight = 33) to erase the crashy flight from the records.

If the fatal flight is under FLIGHT_LOG (the last entry is Die/KIA/similar, then find this:

Quote

             FLIGHT_LOG
            {
                flight = 35

Then delete the entire FLIGHT_LOG section from the word FLIGHT_LOG to the closing curly brace }, see below:

Quote

            FLIGHT_LOG
            {
                flight = 35
                35 = Launch,Kerbin
                35 = Flight,Kerbin
                35 = Suborbit,Kerbin
                35 = Orbit,Kerbin
                35 = Land,Kerbin
            }

That should get rid of the crash record and Jeb should work as normal again.