Make/Force Custom Chars into my recruitment list?

[ChristianEcoterrorst]

I'm making my friends and putting them into XCOM 2. I haven't seen them in game. How do I get them ASAP?

[Zloth]

Well, if you want them immediately then just customize a soldier you already have. Once rookies sign up, they forfeit all rights to their own name, race, and even gender. One has to wonder what kind of society this XCom group is going to create when the aliens are kicked out.

[ChristianEcoterrorst]

lol very nice Zloth.

[Flamestalker]

If you have a small character pool then they'll show up sooner or later even with the default setings, but there are several ways you can increase the likelyhood that they show up.

1. The first and simplest is to tick the PoolOnly option in the character pool menu, it makes your starting soldiers and the recruitment list draw from the character pool only until it runs out.

2. To extend on the first options, you can also do some ini edits to get even more control over how the game draws from the character pool. This video explains the ins and outs of the character pool pretty well and which lines you might want to edit.

3. You can also load them directly from the pool if you use this mod. With this mod if you rename a soldier with the name of the character you want you can load that character directly into your game, this saves you alot of time as you dont need to recreate the character from scratch if you want him in your game right now. I really love this mod and I think I can no longer play without it.

[ChristianEcoterrorst]

It's only one guy at the moment. I'll check out your links flamstalker. Thanks.

[Flamestalker]

In that case you probably dont have to do anything for now, the default "Mixed" draw means that your characters will show up about 20/50% of the time when the game has to draw new characters. He will probably show up in recruitment list in the next month, but if you want to guaranty it then just load him in with the mod i listed above

The ini edits are only really interesting if you have a character pool of more than 20 people, so I wouldn't worry about that just yet.

[Wydamn on Linux]

Also keep in mind that if you have a non-rookie soldier show up as a rookie, then it's because you don't have enough character pool rookies. Any rookie that is promoted via missions will get a random class, even if they were "supposed" to have a different class in the character pool screen. Furthermore, soldiers that do show up as the class they're supposed to have will be rare, since they will only show up as mission rewards or as hires from resistance HQ.

The best solution is to have most of your character pool be rookies, and only a small amount of non-rookie soldiers in your character pool. Though there is a bunch of mods that change how this works in different ways.