IXION – Sandbox Mode and Manual Difficulty Changes

The purpose of this guide is to hopefully help out players struggling with the overly difficult balance currently in the game.

Getting Started

I’ll admit the balancing is rough. The lack of guidance throughout the story regarding crucial mechanics such as what to do about an anti-trust population, or that you need to sling probes into space as soon as they are built to keep up with your hulls alloy sink adds its own artificial difficulty upon an already difficult game.

If you just want to play the game at your own pace or just enjoy the story than this guide is for you.

Accessing Save Files

None of your manual save files are encrypted. This means you can directly edit most everything about your save if you like. We will be focusing on settings to optimize an enjoyable / relaxed experience though if you apply the same information you can take it further.

Your Manual save files are located at:

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\BulwarkStudios\Ixion\Saves

You can paste that url in a file explorer or the windows run menu (⊞ Win + R) to access the file directly.

Save Structure & Save editing

The save folders that you see in the screen shot above are labled numerically. The Folders starting from 1 and ascending are your [MANUAL SAVES] (Saves that are editable). The folders with a – infront or negative numbered folders are your autosaves. Any save that you want to edit needs to be a manual save. I recommend making a new save in-game and labeling it something that you will remember that has to do with save editing, because editing any save data CAN corrupt your save. At the least make a backup of the save you are trying to edit.

For this guide we will be using my newest manual save or folder number [14].

I prefer to use notepad++ for my text editor but you can use any that you wish.

If you would like to verify that you are making changes to the correct save you can open SaveState.sav and refference line 15 or the tag “saveStateName”. That is the name you gave your save in-game.

Now onto the settings we want.

Open the Player.sav file in your preferred text editor.

The settings we are looking for are located at line 32 or under the tag “cheat”.

Most of the settings are fairly evident by there titles but I will explain the ones focused on by this guide.

"citizenGodMod": false, -Keeps your population from dying from things such as starvation.
"freezeHullIntegrity": false, -Prevents your hull from constantly needing repairs.
"freezeTrust": false -Prevents your trust from falling.

By setting those options to true (i.e. “citizenGodMod”: true,), and saving the file you can then launch the game, open the edited save, and find your newly found changes have taken effect.