Hello, After flailing about trying to edit persistent.sfs and generally making a mess of things I figured I'd write a quick how-to guide so that others might learn from my mistakes. We'll cover how to edit it without wrecking it, changing crew names, resurrecting dead crew, clearing bugged parts, clearing orbital junk and naming the stuff in orbit. First off, get yourself a text editor that won't screw up your persistent.sfs file. DO NOT USE WORDPAD. It will change all the EOL characters from Unix to Windows and KSP won't be able to load it. I used a free program called 'Notepad ++'. If you've already loaded it into wordpad and wrecked it, then you need to get Notepad++ and load your persistent.sfs file and then go to Edit ->; EOL Conversion and select 'Unix'. Save, and things should be fixed. I haven't tried it yet, but you probably shouldn't edit persistent.sfs while KSP is running. First off - renaming crew. Once you've got your persistent.sfs loaded into your text editor of choice the first thing you'll probably notice are your crew. Each one has a name, some stats and a state. Changing a name simply requires typing a new one after 'Name = '. Keep in mind that Jeb, Bob and Bill get their orange jumpsuits because of their name. If you change Bob Kerman and Bill Kerman to say, Douglas Turbo and Vincent Carducci, then they'll be put into New Guy Silver. Now, if you've been playing the game properly, you've probably killed a few of them. Resurrection is as simple as changing their state from 3 (dead) to 0 (alive). State 1 is used for Kerbalnauts in orbit and I haven't figured out what state 2 is yet. You should also change the ToD (Time of Death) to 0. Below the crew are a series of entries marked 'VESSEL'. These are all your various spacecraft and random orbital detritus. If you are deleting a VESSEL entry you need to make sure that you get everything from 'VESSEL {' down to the closing '}', which will be the line above the next VESSEL entry. Clearing bugged parts. Several folks have been complaining about excessive lag that is only cured by deleting your persistent.sfs file. You may have also noticed parts on the tracking screen that appear to have landed, but don't get cleared away. There's a cure for this. Load up your persistent.sfs and search for 'NaN'. Basically that means that whatever value that is is bugged and causing problems. So if you find a bunch of debris that has 'NaN' for it's various data values then you should delete it. Clearing orbital debris. Much like the above, but you need to be a little more careful about what you're deleting. The first entry in each VESSEL is it's name. Most of it will be things like 'Porkchop Express Debris'. These are the various rocket parts that you've left in orbit. After the name, there will be a series of PART entries that let you know what each piece of debris is made of. Unfortunately, everything separated from your rocket is labeled as 'Debris', so if you've been launching satellites you'll need to be careful to differentiate between 'Debris' that is random boosters and fuel tanks and 'Debris' that is actually your Eye of Kerberus spy satellite. You can usually get a good idea of what's what by checking the various part entries. Once you've found those two dozen pieces of fairing you left in orbit you can simply delete their entire VESSEL entry to get rid of them. It's not keeping it real, but it's certainly easier than trying to match orbits with each of them and de-orbit them manually and maybe you just want to have fun with rockets instead of having to play Planetes: The Game. Now, speaking of the Eye of Kerberus, you carefully launched your satellite into a nice polar orbit and tracking keeps referring to it as 'Porkchop Express Debris'. By simply changing the 'name = ' entry under VESSEL you can give your satellites proper names. Do Not Change the 'name = ' entries under parts, that tells the game what the vessel is made of, not what it should be called on the tracking screen. For further study: What is crew state 2? What is ToD?
Hello, After flailing about trying to edit persistent.sfs and generally making a mess of things I figured I'd write a quick how-to guide so that others might learn from my mistakes. We'll cover how to edit it without wrecking it, changing crew names, resurrecting dead crew, clearing bugged parts, clearing orbital junk and naming the stuff in orbit. First off, get yourself a text editor that won't screw up your persistent.sfs file. DO NOT USE WORDPAD. It will change all the EOL characters from Unix to Windows and KSP won't be able to load it. I used a free program called 'Notepad ++'. If you've already loaded it into wordpad and wrecked it, then you need to get Notepad++ and load your persistent.sfs file and then go to Edit ->; EOL Conversion and select 'Unix'. Save, and things should be fixed. I haven't tried it yet, but you probably shouldn't edit persistent.sfs while KSP is running. First off - renaming crew. Once you've got your persistent.sfs loaded into your text editor of choice the first thing you'll probably notice are your crew. Each one has a name, some stats and a state. Changing a name simply requires typing a new one after 'Name = '. Keep in mind that Jeb, Bob and Bill get their orange jumpsuits because of their name. If you change Bob Kerman and Bill Kerman to say, Douglas Turbo and Vincent Carducci, then they'll be put into New Guy Silver. Now, if you've been playing the game properly, you've probably killed a few of them. Resurrection is as simple as changing their state from 3 (dead) to 0 (alive). State 1 is used for Kerbalnauts in orbit and I haven't figured out what state 2 is yet. You should also change the ToD (Time of Death) to 0. Below the crew are a series of entries marked 'VESSEL'. These are all your various spacecraft and random orbital detritus. If you are deleting a VESSEL entry you need to make sure that you get everything from 'VESSEL {' down to the closing '}', which will be the line above the next VESSEL entry. Clearing bugged parts. Several folks have been complaining about excessive lag that is only cured by deleting your persistent.sfs file. You may have also noticed parts on the tracking screen that appear to have landed, but don't get cleared away. There's a cure for this. Load up your persistent.sfs and search for 'NaN'. Basically that means that whatever value that is is bugged and causing problems. So if you find a bunch of debris that has 'NaN' for it's various data values then you should delete it. Clearing orbital debris. Much like the above, but you need to be a little more careful about what you're deleting. The first entry in each VESSEL is it's name. Most of it will be things like 'Porkchop Express Debris'. These are the various rocket parts that you've left in orbit. After the name, there will be a series of PART entries that let you know what each piece of debris is made of. Unfortunately, everything separated from your rocket is labeled as 'Debris', so if you've been launching satellites you'll need to be careful to differentiate between 'Debris' that is random boosters and fuel tanks and 'Debris' that is actually your Eye of Kerberus spy satellite. You can usually get a good idea of what's what by checking the various part entries. Once you've found those two dozen pieces of fairing you left in orbit you can simply delete their entire VESSEL entry to get rid of them. It's not keeping it real, but it's certainly easier than trying to match orbits with each of them and de-orbit them manually and maybe you just want to have fun with rockets instead of having to play Planetes: The Game. Now, speaking of the Eye of Kerberus, you carefully launched your satellite into a nice polar orbit and tracking keeps referring to it as 'Porkchop Express Debris'. By simply changing the 'name = ' entry under VESSEL you can give your satellites proper names. Do Not Change the 'name = ' entries under parts, that tells the game what the vessel is made of, not what it should be called on the tracking screen. For further study: What is crew state 2? What is ToD?