Convert career game to sandbox game

[gogozerg]

How? I want to keep everything of course, every flight, flags, etc.

I tried to edit my save file to make it look like a sandbox save, but I couldn't make it work.

Any tip?

Edited July 26, 2015 by gogozerg

[Padishar]

Well, it should be possible to look at a sandbox save (best to do it after at least one flight) and compare it to the career one to see what is different. Alternatively, you could just edit the funds and science to give you enough to unlock everything and then just don't worry about the contract side of things. If you run out of money then just give yourself some more. You might also want to upgrade some of your kerbals...

[gogozerg]

Well, it should be possible to look at a sandbox save (best to do it after at least one flight) and compare it to the career one to see what is different.

That's what I did. I went through all the sections and made changes that seemed correct to me.

Alternatively, you could just edit the funds and science to give you enough to unlock everything and then just don't worry about the contract side of things. If you run out of money then just give yourself some more. You might also want to upgrade some of your kerbals...

That's not the problem. I unlocked everything long ago, got $40,000,000 on my bank account, and about 20,000 useless science points left.

Since there's definitely no point in playing career games, I just want to make it clean, but I want to keep all my stations up.

[Thomassino]

I've done this once, but the other way: I converted sandbox to career. What you need to do is make a new sandbox game and match its time with your current career. Then, find in career persistence file your vessels and copy all of them into sandbox persistence ( I recommend creating one ship in sandbox to know where in save file to put vessels from career), same with your kerbals. This should !PROBABLY! work. I have done it in 0.25 and it worked like a sharm.

Good luck!

[gogozerg]

I'll try again.

Stock conversion from career to sandbox, or to science, is something that should be possible.

[Claw]

I would tend to agree with the "start a new sandbox and copy over the vessels" if you aren't very familiar with save games. There are a lot of subtle differences, and even though KSP can be quite buggy, it's often pretty good at spotting inconsistencies (or choking on them...). So if not everything is lined up properly, it often doesn't work.

• So yeah, I would start a new Sandbox save, then exit it back to the main menu.
  
• Make a copy of that new persistence, and name it so it's easy to find as a quicksave. (Consider making a second copy and naming it something like "Start" in case things go bad, you don't have to create a new sandbox game.)
  
• Open that one and your old game with a plain text editor.
  
• Copy the entire FLIGHTSTATE and ROSTER sections. I've pasted the headers below. These sections appear below the SCENARIO blocks in a sandbox game.

(Also, there's no need to fastforward your new save to the same time if you copy the flight state block, which I highly recommend.)

	FLIGHTSTATE
	{
		version = 1.0.4
		UT = 68.6800000000039
		activeVessel = 1
		mapViewFiltering = -1026
		VESSEL
...bunch of vessels, parts, etc...
	}
	ROSTER
	{
		KERBAL
		{
			name = Jebediah Kerman
...and a bunch of kerbals with their flight logs...
		}
	}

Once you do that, now you have a viable quicksave. You also

Cheers,

~Claw

Edited July 26, 2015 by Claw

[gogozerg]

Thank you, marking the thread as answered.

With modules, you may have other things to copy too, like ScanSat data.

[Claw]

With modules, you may have other things to copy too, like ScanSat data.

Ah, yes indeed. Sorry, thought you said it was stock earlier.

Glad you got it fixed up!

~Claw