Can I build a bigger ship?

[El Patron]

Hi guys. I wonder if I can build a bigger ship. Im quite limited with possible place to build on, but if I watch the devs video here on Steam, it looks like he has much bigger ship. Even more than in-game limitations allow. Or is it just misleading look from the video? Or is it because of harder difficulty or something?

[atlantiscze]

In short: "Yes, but.."

It is indeed possible to increase the ship "canvas" size to get more space to build on, however it involves manual save file editing. I'm attaching a guide below.

Before you proceed keep in mind:
- You may experience degraded performance depending on your hardware configuration with very large ships.
- Some ingame systems may behave oddly - your are, after all, bypassing limits set by the developer. I've personally observed power to be slightly problematic on very large ships as nodes simply don't have enough throughput to sustain the whole ship - you may have to separate your ship into few smaller grids. Alternatively, using another game file editing trick you may increase power capacity of each node. Increasing all capacities 10x seems to have pretty much fixed the issue. I can also imagine better power grid design in general might have helped.
- Power consumption grows with your ship. Assuming you use generators this means increased fuel usage (keep in mind fuel is finite resource). I highly recommend setting up solars to at least reduce the fuel usage.
- Same applies for hyperfuel usage however i've never really found this to be an issue.
- Travel times (and therefore anything logistics related) can have a huge impact. May be mitigated by having larger crew or using robots.
- Ship points are used depending on actual ship size. Therefore if you create one large ship via this method you won't be able to create (or capture) another ship afterwards. If you want more ships ensure you create them BEFORE editing your save.
- On the other hand, system points are also affected. Therefore larger ships will be able to have large turret arrays combined with powerful hull/shields which pretty much guarantees a win in nearly any combat scenario.

Personally i use this expansion method on my current save, with ship size of 6x3 tiles. (6 length 3 width). While it may be possible to go little further i assume it may cause some technical issues if gone too far. If you decide to proceed, here is the guide but first..

DANGER: THIS PROCESS MAY PERMANENTLY DESTROY YOUR SAVE FILE. ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR SAVE BEFORE DOING ANY MODIFICATIONS.

1a. Start a new game. It does not particularly matter which scenario you use. I usually start with the abandoned platform one.
1b. Alternatively use an existing save. It does not have to be a new game.
2. Find your ship's name. Its located in the upper left corner above the cargo information. Note this down exactly as it is written. For our example i'll use "NSS SaveEditor". If you have multiple ships ensure you are looking at the correct one.
3. Save the game and quit.
4. Locate your save game folder. For my windows install it is in C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/SpaceHaven/savegames
5. Locate the save file which you want to edit (usually the newest one).
6. Back up the folder. Seriously. Do it.
7. Open the save folder. Inside there should be another folder called "save". Open it.
8. Locate file called "game". As of current version this file lacks any file type (.txt, .xml,...) so it usually stands out.
9. Open the file in your preferred text editor. I highly recommend not using regular notepad for this - you want something that formats the XML content automatically. I've used PSPad, however Notepad++ or similar editors should work just fine.
9b. As the file lacks a file type you may have to right click it, select "Open with" and then select your preferred text editor.
10. Use your text editor's search function (usually accessed by CTRL+F) and input your ship's name which you noted down in step 2. You should get a line similar to this, however your numbers are likely to be somewhat different, that is okay:

<ship sx="28" sy="28" idCnt="12812" ox="-1408" oy="2208" sid="17" fog="false" real="1" ndb="0" sname="NSS SaveEditor">

11. Now you want to modify the numbers in sx="28" and sy="28". sx is your ship's width, sy is your ship's length in tiles. A 1x1 grid ship therefore has 28x28 tiles. To increase your ship's size simply increase these numbers. Always use increments of 28. For example, to get my preferred 6x3 ship size the line would look as this:

<ship sx="84" sy="140" idCnt="12812" ox="-1408" oy="2208" sid="17" fog="false" real="1" ndb="0" sname="NSS SaveEditor">

WARNING: DO NOT SIMPLY COPY-PASTE THIS LINE OVER. Your save's IDs may be different than mine and you may break something. Only touch the "sx" and "sy" parameters. Do not touch anything else.

12. Save the modified file, start the game and try loading your save.
13. If everything went well your available building space should be increased accordingly. I recommend jumping out of the system as your enlarged ship canvas may now actually cover some of the resource asteroids or derelicts. This is more or less only visual, jumping into different system should fix this.
13b. If your game crashes while loading the save you probably made a mistake. A common one is to accidentally delete a '"' in one of the parameters. This also may (or may not) be caused by incorrect or too large values being entered. Don't be greedy, the game is likely to have a meltdown if you try to create a 20x20 ship or similar monster.. Try looking into the file again, you may see the problem, if not, simply copy your backup (you did make one, right?) and try again more carefully.


(Optional) 14. Explore! If you are looking for a more boring casual experience you may, for example increase your crew member stats to turn them into literal demigods, give yourself resources and similar. The save file is not particularly comfortable to read and you probably won't know what some fields mean so try to make smaller changes (creating backups during the process) and avoid touching anything you are not certain about.

Alternatively you may use similar method to actually mod the game to your liking - for example increasing the capacity, fuel usage, range, ... of electrical stuff as i mentioned above - these are however not done in the save file but rather in the main game's file. You will need 7-Zip or similar tool to access it - simply use this tool to open the "spacehaven.jar" file in the game's main directory. In spacehaven.jar open the "library" folder and extract the file "haven". Then proceed to edit it as before. For example, every electrical node can be found by CTRL+F "powerGrid".

I hope this exhaustive wall of text helps someone. I'll try to answer any questions that pop up.

[El Patron]

Looks like it work. The canvas is bigger now. Thans a lot mate. Thanks a lot.