Gimme All That!
To play a faction other than the starting one, you have to kill 1,000P worth of ships from that faction. You also can’t play as the Borg, Yellow Plants, or Flies. Here’s how to make all the factions available from the start.
First you need to make a mod folder:
Goto C:\Users\Your User Name\Saved Games\Reassembly
Make a new folder named mods.
Inside the mods folder, make a folder called All Factions. This will be your new mod.
Now we’re going to copy the file we need to edit.
Goto Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Reassembly\data
There is a file there called factions.lua. Make a copy of this file and place it in your All factions folder.
Open your copied factions.lua with Notepad++.
You’ll see each line for a faction looks like this:
8 = { name=_(“Terran”), playable=2, start=”8_interceptor”,
color0=0x113077, color1=0xaaaaaa, aiflags=FORGIVING|WANDER|DODGES|SOCIAL|TRACTOR_TRANSIENT },
The part we care about is the piece that says playable=2. You’ll notice the other playable factions are labeled as playable=1. That means they are playable, but you need to kill 1000P worth of ships to unlock them. Playable=2 means the faction is playable from the start.
Go down the list and change the faction from playable=1 to playable=2. (2, 3, 4, 11, 12, 14, 15) – Now all the playable factions are unlocked.
For factions 6, 7, and 13 (Borg, Flies and Bad plants) you have to add the playable=2. It goes after the name like so:
13 = { name=_(“Spikey Plant”), playable=2, etc., etc.
Save your changes and your’e done.
If you don’t want to edit all this, you can download the file already edited here.
Once you have your edited factions.lua file setup in the All Factions mod folder, go back into Reassembly.
In the Mods menu, you will see you mod is active. If you did it properly, you SHOULD see errors. Since the file modifies the default factions, the game is warning you of that fact, but it’s totally OK.
If however, you see a message that the file is corrupt, you did something wrong. Maybe a comma out of place, or you forgot the = sign somewhere. Close the game and go back and check your file again.
Once you have everything set, start a new game and all the factions should be selectable. Just be aware that the Borg, Spikey Plants, and Flies were not meant to be playable. You will encounter many bugs and random crashes while playing as these factions.
I tried this, so as to try out “Spiky Plants” in campaign mode, and nearly gave up, thinking it impossible. Purely making the above modification didn’t cut it for me.
Eventually I got there by editing the “factions.lua” file (in a different directory) to add “playable=2” in the Faction “13” section. As described here for being able to play modded factions: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=517369883
It’s cool that I have my spiky green ship now, and some starter designs, but it won’t rebuild or re-configure without opening up console. Have I somehow managed to mess something up? Also, is it normal with this faction to be unable to collect resources? (Obviously it’s classed as “unplayble” for a reason.)
If it doesn’t work, I’ll have to look into that. This is how I made the factions playable before modding was implemented, so maybe something changed.
Editing factions.lua works too. I didn’t show people this way because if the game updates that file, you’ll lose your changes. You can still do it that way, but make a mod folder for your factions.lua – http://reassemblyerect.com/mods and go down to ‘make a local mod.’
The Spikey plant faction has always been buggy. Pretty sure it was never meant to be playable. That’s why I never made a mod for it.
Now I’ve just seen that Camo5’s Steam guide covers this too (buried in the middle), and he primarily suggests adding the line to the cvars.txt file “kPlayableFactions = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16}”. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=407670942 And then your above tip to save killing a 1k ship too.
Now that I remember, I never meant for this to unlock the unplayable factions because they were all buggy when I tried them out. Also, the kPlayableFactions cvar edit does not work when I tested it, so something changed with the game at some point (I know it used to work). I’ll probably rework this post to included editing the factions.lua since that’s easier to do now.