How to control who your friends will be

[SVP]

I've found the way to control which three friends you will meet in your playthrough. It's not hard at all.

The friends you'll have in the game are rolled at character creation. The information is one of many things stored in a file called psm_data.sav which is in your save directory. It also records things like what locations and actions you've unlocked. Here are the steps.

1. We're going to be editing your save file, so the first thing you're going to need to do is turn off Steam Cloud Save for Growing Up. You can do this by right clicking the game in your Steam Library and then Properties. Now the game won't replace the saves on your hard drive.

2. Go ahead and make a new game. Fill out the parents, gender and letter. Once you're in the baby's room, exit the game.

3. Go to your save directory for the game. Mine is in:
This PC > Documents > Growing Up
Yours should be too. In there, you're going to see a bunch of directories with a bunch of numbers, such as 1660211264. These numbers refer to the time your game was saved. Look for either the highest number, or the one most recently modified. That's your new save game.

4. Inside that folder is a folder called DATA. Inside DATA will be a few files, one of which is psm_data.sav. Open that file with a simple text program like Notepad. You'll see a confusing bunch of words, brackets and other goodies, but at least it's English.

5. Use Ctrl+F to activate your Find function. Search for "id". Include the quotes.

6. You'll find a string of text. Mine looks like:
"id":{"payload":"ALEX","name":"id","ByteTagType":30}},"name":"ALEX","ByteTagType":50}

searching more for "id" I also get:
"id":{"payload":"NATHAN","name":"id","ByteTagType":30}},"name":"NATHAN","ByteTagType":50} and
"id":{"payload":"SAM","name":"id","ByteTagType":30}},"name":"SAM","ByteTagType":50}

7. These lines show my game is currently set up for me to meet Alex, Nathan and Sam. Their name appears twice in their individual lines. Simply change both instances of their name to the person you want to meet. The names as the game wants them are:

Elementary School
ALEX
BOBBIE
JAKE
RICHARD

Middle School
WENDY
ALICIA
NATHAN
HOFFER

High School
SAM
FLICK
PATTY
KATO

8. Save the file and return to your game. It's all set.

A couple of notes. This method has been tested using a fresh game with a newborn child. I do not know how it will behave if you edit a game in progress. I also don't know how it will behave if you try to put someone in a school they don't belong, like putting SAM in Elementary School. I wouldn't try it.

Happy living

[UchihaKira40]

OMG, it works! You my friend are a genius! Thanks so much!

[SVP]

Tonight's testing proved it's possible to use this method to choose who you will meet. I will edit the the first post to include this method.

[Onion Budgie]

That's very helpful, thank you.

[UchihaKira40]

I'm finally got Hoffer! This is a neat trick! I wonder what else can be manipulated? lol

[Avalanche]

Originally posted by SVP:

Tonight's testing proved it's possible to use this method to choose who you will meet. I will edit the the first post to include this method.

Now, you got to ask, 'WHY THE HELL DID THE DEVS NOT DO THIS THEMSELVES?' its common sense. :-)

[RedButterfly33]

Now if someone can figure out how to unlock locations the same way, my life would be complete :D

[Null]

Since we can know edit the save, it is possible to get all the npcs in one save? Maybe even some other things in the game like unlocked location or available purchase?

[Momo]

Tysm!

[Lewis]

Would it be possible to change their names? Or is that something thats very unlikely to happen

[SVP]

Originally posted by Lewis:

Would it be possible to change their names? Or is that something thats very unlikely to happen

I looked into it for you and it seems very unlucky. Information on the characters outside of the few you can customise is stored in the game files, not our save game. Those files are created in the Unity engine, making them impossible to edit with a simple text editor. Additionally, taking a look at those files without editing them, I can see that the characters names appear directly in the script as well. Even if I could change, say, Alex's name to Jenny on her text box label, you would still see sentences like "You pass the paper to Alex" because that's how the script reads.

tl:dr: outside my skill level.

Originally posted by Null:

Since we can know edit the save, it is possible to get all the npcs in one save? Maybe even some other things in the game like unlocked location or available purchase?

Getting all the characters in one play wouldn't be possible. It looks like the game loads one value for each stage when you create the game. Loading a second value would just overwrite the first one. That's my guess at least. I'm not really an expert. I was able to create the friend choosing method because I was still working inside the constraints of the game, just changing what number the die rolled as it were. Making in load multiple characters per age would involve changing the structure of how the game runs, which would require Unity.

Getting all the locations in one run might be more feasible. psm_data.sav adds more lines as we play. If I was going to attempt that, I'd make a copy of a save right before opening a location, then one right after and run a comparison program to see what was added. Then I'd try adding the new values to another save and see if the location opened up. Just a lot of trial and error.

[Devlukka]

Thanks for this guide, makes it more bearable to replay the game while having some amount of control who shows up per run.