Prepare Carefully or Character Editor mod?

[Furious Kaiser]

I have more experience with the Prepare Carefully mod, but I have a friend who has been saying the Character Editor mod is superior. I tried out the CE mod, but I wasn't a big fan of how it does stuff in starting up a custom game. Does it really allow more customization or am I doing something wrong and/or just not getting it?

[Jaggid Edje]

CE definitely offers far more customization, not to mention being functional at all times, not just when you are first starting the game. Prepare carefully retains more 'randomness' though, just with a lot of control to it.

If you're not seeing that CE has more customization....I don't know what to tell you. It's right there when you use it. You can change, literally, anything. That's not true with Prepare carefully.

Still, I think it's a matter of personal preference which is "superior". CE feels a lot more like outright cheating than Prepare Carefully does, at least to me. I'd prefer to use Prepare carefully over CE for that reason, except for the fact that Prepare carefully has serious performance issues for me.

[Furious Kaiser]

So my main issue with CE was I was trying to add custom xenotype pawns to a colony at the start (pre launch) and then randomize some aspects. I am aware with xenotype genes that you can add multiple cosmetic stuff for each body part (hair color, skin color, etc) and the game will randomise those specific things but only with what cosmetic genes you have added per "cosmetic layer", if you know what I mean. Prepare carefully allows me to load a xenotype and then randomize it a bit within the parameters (if any) of the cosmetic genes of the xenotype. Where as with CE there are a few randomize buttons, but after an hour of experimenting and messing around with it, all I could get it to do was select a xenotype, and then I click a randomize button and now I got a chicken or boomalope or whatever in place of the pawn I was trying to create.

Now I will fully admit that I am probably doing something wrong, but I am an experimenter and tinkerer with programs and other things, but CE just, at first attempt and in my personal experience, not very user friendly. And again, this was after quite a bit of tinkering and experimenting on my part.

Any insight and tips would be much appreciated.

But then again, I am more familiar with PC and have more experience with it, so there is a bias there.

[Jaggid Edje]

Oh, sheeze, my last reply was entirely wrong...somehow despite talking about Proper Carefully, I responded as if I was talking about Prepare procedurally. Silly me. I blame the fact that I just got done ditching Prepare Procedurally this morning due to the performance issues.

I don't disagree with you at all regarding the actual Prepare Carefully mod vs. CE. I think it's really mostly just a matter of personal preference. I've never messed with the random xenotypes in CE though, so you may be right that PC gives you more options there.

I set up Xenotypes ahead of time with the Xenotype Spawn Control mod, so just load them in at the game start.

[Bosh]

Character editor. I've heard that prepare carefully edits pawns in a very hacky way that can damage save files.

[Steelfleece]

Prepare Carefully does some wonky stuff in the background that can permanently affect save files and may cause damage down the road, even if it isn't immediately noticed. Until PC gets a complete rewrite, I'd advise Character Editor, even if I did like PC's interface better myself.

[Hoki]

on a sidenote - there is also pawneditor which is the newest addition to this type of mod. haven used it as im quite happy with CE

its worth giving a try but by the looks of it it seems to have a fair amount of bugs depending on the modpack.

[Mringasa]

I used Prepare Carefully since it came out. Switched over to Character Editor for 1.5, and it's basically the same thing. The only real difference is in the UI. From a player perspective. I'm sure there's piles of things under the hood that are different, but it offers the exact same functionality that Prepare Carefully did on game start, and some extras in there as well.

The UI is clunky, and some of the interactions aren't too obvious, but just clicking things and mucking about with it will give you a good overview. Other than that, it is much better than Prepare Carefully, imo at least.

[Hykal]

Originally posted by Hoki:

on a sidenote - there is also pawneditor which is the newest addition to this type of mod. haven used it as im quite happy with CE

its worth giving a try but by the looks of it it seems to have a fair amount of bugs depending on the modpack.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3219801790

Here's the link if anyone wants to try it.

It's pretty good. Not as indepth as Character Editor yet but does what I want it to do.