Can you change Sandbox/Science/Career choice later

[The_Rocketeer]

Is there a way to change a Career save to a Sandbox save etc?

[Wjolcz]

You could just cheat it, I guess.

I would try creating a new sandbox save and put the persisten.sfs (?) into it. Might work.

Edited July 6, 2016 by Veeltch

[BlkBltChemie]

I have not tried this myself, but in the persistent file, about 8 lines down from the top, there is a line that states Mode = CAREER or Mode = SANDBOX.  (This could just tell the the game what symbol to put next to the save in the load previous menu as far as I know but may be worth a shot.)  You could maybe give it a try just changing those although I would certainly backup first.

As a quick look, everything seems the same until you scroll down a little.  That is, even the sandbox save has a {CAREER} block where the funds multipliers, etc are defined even though it is not used in game.  However, scrolling further gives a {SCENARIO} block where I started to see some differences.  For the career save, the first section is Name = ContractSystem and goes to several others; whereas for the sandbox save, I see Name = ScenarioNewGameIntro followed by Name = ProgressTracking and several others.  It looks like there are several for career but not sandbox, but at a glance it looks like all the sandbox ones are present in the career savefile.  (I didn't scan much further than this so there may be many more differences further along.)

At a guess it may be okay to convert career -> sandbox, but the reverse is probably more questionable.  That said, you aren't supposed to be able to access the Admin Building, Mission Control, or R&D in sandbox so by converting from career to sandbox they may actually be available (along with the funds, science, and reputation counters) even if they don't do anything.

May be worth a try and I'd be curious to hear how it turns out, but certainly approach with caution!

Edited July 7, 2016 by BlkBltChemie

[Snark]

Moving to Gameplay Questions.

[bewing]

Sandbox is just career mode with an infinite amount of cheat money and science. You can always use the Alt Alt F12 menu to do basically the same thing to a career game in progress.

The game should probably crash if you try to convert a sandbox game to career. The whole contract system would probably be missing -- because it wouldn't know where to start.

[wumpus]

I'd recommend using a cheat-enabled (with arbitrary funds and unlocked science) over an official sandbox mode anyway.  The only downside is that if you have both sandbox and career modes running, you won't see the proper icons in the load screen.  On the other hand, sandbox disables parts of the game, the most obvious to me is the landing percentages and cost recovery data.  While the cost recovery might not matter (since you have arbitrary amounts of funds), it rarely matters all that much in career mode either but always seemed a worthy goal.  In sandbox it outright refuses to tell you how much you recovered.  Science will tell you how many Mits the data size is (dependent only on experimental apparatus), and nothing about the value of the data.  If you like to do surface samples and see large values of science, sandbox can be disappointing (neither pre-unlocked and sandbox require tedious "science dances" in every biome you find).

[Van Disaster]

If all you're worried about is craft, you can copy them between saves - each savegame directory has subdirectories for SPH & VAB containing your saved craft files. There's no difference in craft between types of save ( other than you being able to make craft in sandbox with parts which would be locked in career ).