X-COM: UFO Defense – How to Create Supersoldiers

This game is fairly easy when u know how to play it. But, even being very easy, it may become even easier when u don’t mind cheating a bit. Actually, this is one way of cheating I personally like. It is a kind of smart cheat, requires little knowledge and work. At the end of the day it is still a cheat, though. Important information: we will edit game file.

Guide to Creating Supersoldiers

All credit goes to failsafe!

Cheating…

What we need? A hex editor. No problem with these – one can find a hex editor on Microsoft Store. For example Super Hex Editor.

Another thing u need is a dec-hex calculator. You will find some in the internet – don’t need to download them, they allow to do calculations online.

Last thing u need is a game file. To adjust our soldiers skills we will edit soldier.dat file – it comes with the game along some other .dat files, each in folder for each game save.

Now, u start the game and save it – easiest will be to do this on first slot, but it doesn’t matter. You also have to check list of Your soldiers. Note value of first skill of each of your soldiers. Lets say it is 58 for first soldier.

Open calculator and convert dec 58 into hex – it will be 3E. Hex figures are little different, because there are alltogether 16 types of figures: 1-9 and A-F. Two bit notation can code figure “worth” 0-255. Or something like this. We don’t need to know this… though it is worth to dig a little. Many, many years ago (in far galaxy…) using hex editors used to be a main way to “enchance” games.

Anyway, back to business.

We open hex editor and look for our first soldier. Fairly easy – hex editor will show his name visible in “translated” area. Now, look for our 3E (or any other figure you should have). Most probably this will be very first figure after long line of doube zeros following full name of our soldier.

You can decide what kind of figure u wish to have instead of starting value. Since we are cheating anyway, why not give our dude a really strong boost? So we place “64” instead of our starting figure (64 hex = 100 dec).

We are almost there. We put 64 in following six pairs of figures – alltogether we change 7 corresponding pairs. Final hex sequence will be like this: 64 64 64 64 64 64 64.

You do the same for other soldiers and, voila, you have a company of supersoldiers. Don’t forget to give them some guns, since they will not kill with bare hands, which is – I believe – a bug in the game. Riffles do a trick.

Disclaimer: this cheat spoils a game but is kind of fun to spoil a game this way. By the way, the same “trick” works for other stuff in the game, like money, stock ect.