How to (tediously) Transfer Your Pawns/Colony to a New Save File

A janky way to semi-safely transfer your pawns, items, colony, etc. from one (broken, messed up) save file into a nice shiny clean save file!

um why tho

I build giant multi-generational colonies and get emotionally attached to all of them because I raised them from birth and now they have grandchildren and it's just... *sentimental weeping*

So when I mess up my save file with sketchy mods or I want to restart a world with new mods, or y'know, a new update is released to the game that will soon throw my entire save file into hell...

While some of you heartless bassetards are out here playing war crime simulator 3000, I'm wasting my life using this incredibly long, tedious process to save my precious fictional children from one save file to the next.

So for those of you who also have unhealthy attachments to fictional people, I got your back!

Mods You'll Need

Character Editor

Set up Camp

(Optional) VE Base Generation

In Your Old Save, In Your Old Settlement

If You Want to Keep Your Base Structure/Layout

NOTE: This is only necessary if you want to keep the literal walls and floors, etc. You can save everything else (even furniture) without this step.

This part is complicated af honestly............. if you aren't familiar with coding or digging around in RImworld's mod files, I suggest you just take a screenshot of your base, then use god mode (which gives no building costs) in the dev tools to just re-draw everything. It will be much easier than trying to do this with no previous knowledge.

If you really insist on doing this, though, you will need VE Base Generation mod, and my incredibly bad instructions for how to use it can be found at the end of this guide.

Pack Up Your Moving Boxes!

STEP ONE: Furniture and Stuff

Uninstall any furniture/etc you can uninstall that you wanna keep. (remember you can uninstall SRTS ships and just put those in your pocket lol)

"Can't you just godmode build your furniture lol" Yes. But godmode will spawn everything as (normal). If you have a bunch of masterwork, excellent, legendary chairs and beds and stuff, this will preserve that. And some furniture is not that simple to just god mode in.

You can keep artwork, books, etc. BUT it will lose their personalization and the stories listed in the "art" tab. I do not know how to save those.

Sadly, you will also lose the traits, names, etc. of persona weapons, though it will keep the base type (ex., plasmasword) and quality level. It will totally re-reroll the traits and (unless actively equipped) who it's bonded to. So.... proceed with caution.

If you are trying to preserve graves... do NOT dig up their bodies or try to carry them with you. It doesn't work like that. We'll get to dead people in a moment.

if you're doing this so you can safely remove mods from your save file, do not be a derp and try to save furniture/items specific to that mod.

STEP TWO: People - prep work

Write down a list of all your pawns' family relationships and lovers if you want to preserve them. The process we'll be doing manages to keep relationships intact about like 60% of the time, so if just make a list of who begat who if you care about that.

Note: Because of how the game and character editor handle child/parent relationships, if you have, say, two brothers, they will only know they are brothers if you assign a parent to them. so you'll have to bring their dead dad. or be prepared to assign them a random ass world pawn as their father. (we'll say he went out for milk...)

We will actually be saving those people in a second.

STEP THREE: Dead People

If you want to preserve dead colonists... either the memory of them, their familial ties, or their grave, follow this step.

Open the character editor. In the upper-left there is a tiny globe icon that changes from grey to white when you click on it. One version shows *all* your colonists (even dead ones) and the other is only the live ones in your settlement right now .

Change it to all, and find your dead colonists you want to keep, and save them. (little save file icon under their picture. if you need more save slots, you can make it longer in the mod settings).

(I recommend being very selective about which dead people you bring, because the process is kind of a pain. When you get to a new save, you will have to re-kill these people using dev mode, as they will spawn alive. This makes your colonists sad and you either have to live with that or go into the "needs" tab and manually delete the memory of the death from every single colonist. Because this is so gd tedious and annoying, I only bring over the characters I absolutely 100% want to remember.)

Now that you've packed up everything you want from your whole colony, it's time to move!

Move out!

form a caravan with every pawn and bonded animal in it, carrying everything they own, and use dev mode to just say leave the map immediately which automatically puts everything into their inventories even if they can't actually carry it.

Travel to another tile using the "Set Up Camp" mod (or a mod with that feature), which treats it like a quest map instead of a settlement (this prevents your pawns from dropping all the ♥♥♥♥ in their inventory!)

In Your Old Save, In Your New Camp

Save Every Single Pawn

Using Character Editor, save every single pawn using the little save icon under their image. Select a slot for them (and be sure you don't accidentally save over anyone!)

This will save not only the pawn themselves, but everything in their inventory will be there when you get to the new save.

You can save the animals this way, too. You will have to select them on the map, as they don't show up in your colonists list. But you save them the exact same way you save a pawn.

If you don't have enough slots, you can use the mod's settings to add even more slots.

If you STILL don't have enough slots (yes I have been there), you can save/export the entire list into a txt file on your desktop, then safely save over those slots with new pawns. (You will then have to import that list back into character editor in order to get everyone.) CAREFUL because when you save, the txt file is always called "pawnslots.txt." You need to rename it, because the next time you hit save, it will save over "pawnslots.txt." (To make your renamed list re-appear in the game, you need to rename it to "pawnslots.txt" to make it show up. There can only be one pawnslots.txt at a time. You gotta juggle.)

Save Your Game

Save your game now, with everyone packed up and on this new camp tile. If something goes wrong, you can load this up (with all the mods it had at the time) and fix it.

In Your New Save

Start a New Save

If you were doing this to fix your broken mods list, make sure you load the new save with all the mods you want to use.

Choose a scenario, then go into the scenario edit mode. (You'll need dev mode on for this)

If you saved your settlement's walls/floors: Add to the scenario the option like "Spawn a custom building on the staring map." You'll have to scroll down to the very bottom of the list of stuff in your scenario and it'll be at the very bottom. Find your settlement and choose it, and put it in the center. Idk why but in my game, though it offers a drop down, it doesn't actually populate with what you select? You still have to type it in. I always select it and then type in the name just to be safe.

It doesn't matter who your starting colonists are 'cause we're going to delete them (Sorry...)

Spawn in the Pawns

Open character editor.

It doesn't matter what character you have selected... Under their picture, click the load icon and select a pawn from your list It will add them to the colony and scoot the whole menu over so you can "teleport" your new pawn onto the map.

Do this for every single pawn you saved. All nine hundred of them, you hoarder. Yes, even the dead ones. They will spawn in alive. We'll fix that in a sec lol....

If you brought over dead pawns... Consider spawning them in first, but it's not necessary. They will show up as alive, and you will have to kill them again. Since this makes colonists sad, do it before you spawn in the colonists and what they don't know won't hurt them! (However, if you don't have the other colonists in yet, you can't edit their family relationships, and once you kill a pawn, you can't fully access the social menu for them in character editor anymore. Other pawns can stil add them asa family member, but you can't change the dead pawn's relationships. When I did this, for some reason it made my dead pawn think her husband was her stepfather, which uhhhhhh... ahem. I couldn't change that after she was dead without reviving and killing her again. It's up to you what order you do it in... Both options have their own obnoxious complications.)

Problems and Troubleshooting for Spawning Pawns

If you try to load a pawn and nothing happens... It means they have something saved in their inventory that is incompatible with your new save. Maybe it was from a mod you deleted, or something weird went wrong. Don't panic! Just write down that pawn's name and finish the list.

Save your new game and return to your old save. Make sure you allow it to load all the old mods you had. Find the problem pawns and look at their inventory, and remove anything that looks problematic. If it says "Minified thing" instead of what it actually is, remove it. Idk why some of them do that. I know the tents from this mod: Tents don't work for this like 80% of the time. And so do a lot of the furniture/buildings from VFE Ancients. Idk why.

Character Editor automatically removes any hediffs, needs, etc. that don't work with your new mod list, so if there is a problem, it is 99.9% the inventory. (If it's not the inventory I can't help you >_>)

The family relationships often get really messed up... Character Editor saves like half of them. It often turns parents into step-parents if it remembers they're married but not that they had kids. And if you have any mixed-race alien families using the HAR stuff, it will automatically disconnect the family members if they aren't the same race. (So an elf and an orc have a baby elf. The game will remember the elf parent but not the orc parent.)

How to fix this... Go into the "social" tab of every pawn and manually add the relationships. (You made a list, right?) I recommend you start with the youngest generation of your colony, since you can add parents more easily than children. You can also add the bonded animals if they got messed up.

I mentioned this earlier, but if you want two siblings to be related, you *have* to assign them a parent in character editor to make that work. If you brought their dead dad, great! If you did not, just pick some random person in another faction... or one of the ones you started the scenario with, whatever.

Delete Those Randos

in Character Editor, there is a little star-like icon in the upper-right of a pawn's picture. Like this +

Click it and new options will appear. One of those is a big fat minus sign.

Select the randos you started this save file with.

And remove all trace of them from this existence.

(Ideology sometimes considers this a "death" and tells you to have a funeral for them but... jokes on ideology 'cause no one remembers them anyway)

Kill Your Dead Pawns

If you're not familiar with dev tools, up at the top click the little play button. There's like a million buttons in that menu, but go into search and type "kill" (mwahah). Select the kill button, and now you can just one-click kill your pawns that should have been dead on arrival.

Fix their family relationships BEFORE you kill them, however, 'cause that's a lot harder to change once they're dead.

Tidy Up Their "Needs" Tab

So the weirdest thing about doing this is sometimes pawns will remember their own death lolol. I think what happens is that they are remembering a family member that wasn't loaded when you spawned them? I have no idea. In game, it says like "My cousin [my name] died" but in the needs tab, it'll show up as like "My {0} died." Use the plus and minus signs to erase that.

If they still remember you heartlessly killing their dead relatives for a second time before their very eyes, you can use the plus minus things to remove that memory as well.

If you have a bajillion colonists, doing this for every single one is a pain in the ass, which s why I suggest evaluating whether or not you REEEEEALLY need to bring over that dead person or not when you save your pawns lol.

Unpack and Rebuild

Dump their inventory and you'll have everything you wanted to save!

If you toggle god mode (it's that mask icon at the top) you can rebuild anything on your base that you had before. Either clean up the weirdness that happened when you spawned in your saved settlement, or rebuild everything using the screenshot you took.

Using VE Base Generation to Save Your Base Structure

Use the VE base generation mod tools to save the base (it won't save everything tho and some stuff will generate weird but you'll get like 80% of it) and turn it into a "mod" so you can start a new game and "generate map with this building in the center" to mostly keep your base.

To do that...

Turn on dev mode.

Under "Orders" there is now an "Export from Area" button. The other export button has limited space restrictions. So make a new area and put everything you want to save in that area, then click that button.

A window will pop-up with some options. Make sure to check the stuff about spawning power grids and keeping the roofs you had built. And the one saying roof clearance, to prevent mountains from spawning on your fields.

When you "export" it, it just copies stuff to your clip board. So tab out.

Go into a text file (or code editor) and paste it.

Make sure the top of it looks like this at the top:

<Defs> (you'll have to type this)

Then under that, scootched over a bit, it should have this:

<KCSG.StructureLayoutDef>
<defName>SSBuilds_BurbCafeteriaLarge1</defName>
<layouts>

With the defname being the name of the stuff you entered in when you exported it. And then under that is all the gibberish you pasted. (Or this is part of the pasting? Just make sure it looks like this)

Underneath all your pasted gibberish (I know, everyone who knows actual code right now is crying), make sure it says:

</KCSG.StructureLayoutDef>

And then flush with the left, with no spaces before it, put this:

</Defs>

Save that file as whatever you want with no spaces but the file extension must be ".xml"

Go to your manually-added mods folder, which should be hereish: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\RimWorld\Mods

Make a folder called whatever you want (Mine is SSBuilds, for Sugarstar Builds). Inside that folder make the following folders:

Mods\SSBuilds\About
Mods\SSBuilds\Defs\LayoutDefs\YourFile.xml

Your "About" folder needs an "About.xml" file which I just copied from another mod (check in here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\workshop\content\294100 ... pick any of them and use their About as a template for yours. Just change the text in it to things you will recognize.)

If you didn't eff it up, next time you load your game, there will be a mod called whatever you named it, with a big L in front of it (L for Local).

Once you add it to your game, test if it works:

Start a new game.
Choose a scenario.
Select edit the scenario.
Add a "part" and choose the "spawn custom building on map" thing.
Scroll to the very bottom.
Click to select the building...... and look or whatever you named yours.
If it's there, IT WORKS!

If it's not there...... seriously consider just skipping this step and re-drawing your settlement in god mode, 'cause I barely know how to do this, let alone teach you.

Genotypes

I still do not fully understand genotypes or how they work, honestly.

But I've noticed that if you spawn in a pawn without a genotype (say, from before Biotech at all), it will make them just an ordinary human. You can use character editor to give them the traits you want, or assign them a whole genotype. (Note: The will rewrite the pawn's clothes, hair, skin, etc... to be whatever is default for the new genotype.) Traits added one at a time won't do that.

[Eternull]

might do this one day. My save got borked due to insect faction and I was doing archonexus. For now I stay playing on old update because anomoly isn't important to me

[charlieo123]

Your my saviour man, I'm weeping like hell when I saw this. Thanks a ton!

[Juan_B]

I learned how to spell scootch. Thanks for that, and for the guide. I'm still on my first run through... but I can tell I'm attached to a few of these mangled individuals.

[mistersoja]

hey, two things:

1. When loading your pawns in from the character editor, I found that loading parents *first* and their children afterwards keeps social relationships intact.

2. I had the problem that I had both parents and their children, but only wanted the children in the new colony. Instead of killing their parents or simply not loading them in at all, I used the 'Pass To World'-debug command on all parents. That way they still exist in the new world, they're now just part of other factions and not present on my map anymore.
If it does behave like the archonexus quest, where you also (kinda) do a newgame+, that means that those parents might even appear in future raids.

[Teamson]

Would you think one could use this to create a new site which can be used for a costum quest?

[JayleeVT]

@noodle - oh, if you have dev tools on, you just right click the space and go there instantly. Lol.

[noodle pfp]

how do you get your caravan to move to the new site and set up camp if they cannot move at all from over encumberment?

[Mr. Plague Doc]

at that point i'd rather just start a new save lmao

[JayleeVT]

#Knpnk-but-in-russian DAMN yeah sure, go for it, man! That's awesome! Haha

[KKRLL56]

Hey. Can I translate your guide from English into Russian giving all the neccessary credits about the original guide and the author (you)?