Terminally Incoherent

After all that supposed data loss excitement I have launched Freelancer to play for a bit. I immediately noticed that I was sitting in a shitty light fighter ship, and recalled that I was working toward a nice heavy fighter available on a battleship stationed nearby. I checked my funds and I only had about $23k. The ship I wanted was in the $80k range. That meant many repetitive pointless missions, or hours of flying doing trade routes. I just wanted to skip to the next story based mission for some exciting, scripted combat sequences.

So I started digging in the guts of the game. I checked some modding tutorials, and found that the prices of goods sold all over the universe are stored in a single file called goods.ini. I figured out that I can change prices of some goods to make my trading quicker and easier. I quickly located it, but unfortunately it was a binary file that could not be edited by hand… Or could it?

It turns out that the huge Freelancer community created a tool to modify these files quite easily: BiniQDU. You install it, then launch it, open an ini file of your choice and edit away. It even provides nice syntax highlighting for your convenience:

I peeked what I had in the cargo bay: bunch of H-Fuel cells. I closed the game, launched the tool, found the entry titled h_fuel in goods.ini and changed the price attribute to 10,000. You will also notice that below price, there are some other attributes which are, I think multipliers to price. The station where I was happened to have a bad sell price, so it got multiplied by the bad_sell_price attribute which was set to 0.41. When I went back to the game, I only got about 4,100 per unit. Still, with 20-something units in the cargo bay, I ended up with only few thousand credits over the 80k that I needed to get the better ride.

After I sold the fuel, I closed the game, went back and changed the price of H-Fuel back to 300 in case I planned to trade normally in the future. Of course if I wanted to I could have set the price of a single unit to 100,000,000 and never again worry about money. But that could make the game boring down the road, so I opted not to.

So I was still broke, but this time with a better ship. Now I’m tempted to explore all the other files, and see what else can I modify. From what I know, in this game, sky is the limit.

Btw, the goods.ini file can be found in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Freelancer\DATA\EQUIPMENT\

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 11th, 2007 at 4:45 am and is filed under games, howto, tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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