Morrowind Save Hacking Guide, with Enchanted Editor Options

[roofus]

This is a simple how-to guide for hacking Morrowind Savegames with Morrowind Enchanted Editor 0.91c, and re-signing them with XSavSig. Before you leap into this, I might warn you this guide requires a moderate level of technical expertise

To continue, you will need:
-FTP access to your Xbox
-Morrowind Enchanted Editor 0.91c
-XSavSig 0.05
-any Hex Editor of your choice (Hex Workshop, XVI32 both work nicely, I'm using Hex Workshop here)

First, if you haven't done so already, go ahead and install any of the above utilities you are missing.
Fetch your Morrowind save from your Xbox harddrive that you want to modify. Go to E/UDATA/42530005/. Under here, you'll have a list of funny looking hashes in hexadecimal. There is a way to calculate what the hash will be for a given save game, but it's easier just to check in each folder until you find the savegame you want to modify. It should look like yoursavenamehere.ess, and there should also be a vv.dat file in the directory as well. Transfer the .ess file and the vv.dat file over to your computer to some easy to remember folder.
Done with that part? Not so hard was it?

Basic Editing
Run Morrowind Enchanted Editor (might take a little while to start up on slower computers). Go to File > Open..., find and select your ess file. Enchanted editor will chew on it for a little while, then you should see a nice listing of every element inside your save file. Most of it should be relatively straightforward, except for a few parts we are primarily concerned with:
Your main character information will be under Player Reference Data (REFR):
Character Attributes (Strength, Intelligence, Willpower, etc) is under REFR > ACDT. You will notice that there are two variables for every attribute, the current value, and base value. The only time they won't match in a save file is if they have been permanently modified by something.
Character Skills (Armorer, Athletics, Alchemy, etc) is under REFR > CHRD. Same thing for base vs current attributes goes here.
Alrighty, now that we can fix that stuff, onto some more important areas, namely your inventory (including gold!). This is actually stored under the NPC copy of your player. To check this out, go to Non Player Characters > NPC_player. Here, you can edit your Name, your Head, your Hair, your Race, your Class, and even your Level. There is a copy of the original values of your strength, intelligence, and such for your race, but this has no effect on your actual attributes. Current Health, Magicka (SpellPoints), Fatigue can also be modified here. Following the information at the beginning of this section and the FLAG section, is a list of the current items in your inventory! Inventory items have the NPCO tag, and list the internal name of the item (ItemID) and how many of this item you have (count). You can change the ItemID to something else if you wanted just by typing in a new name there, or click the "..." button next to the ItemID box to view a whole list of internal names in the original Morrowind.esm file.
You may notice some funky ItemIDs in your inventory if you are into Alchemy. This is because custom made potions here are referenced by a number in the Alchemy section. If you want to edit the potion, go to the Alchemy section, hopefully find it by its name, weight, value, etc and edit those attributes accordingly. I can't say I know exactly what all the EffectID / SkillID numbers refer to, but here's a few:
Restore Health:
EffectID: 75
SkillID: 46
Levitate:
EffectID: 10
SkillID: 46
The rest you (or maybe someone else on this forum) can find out on your own by making specific potions and looking at how it shows up in the save file.
Spells that you have will show up under your NPC_player as NPCS. They only list the names here as well; just like with Alchemy, the actual spell information is listed under Player Spell Data.
Inserting records of any type is relatively easy, but can be dangerous. Just find the header of the section that you want to add to, then right click on it and click Insert Record. Then, using a similar record as a template, copy information from that record and change the name or quantity or whatever as needed.
Also, a sidenote: to those looking to slimfast their saves to fix Dirty Disk Errors and such, for now I will recommend checking under Containers Altered by Player (CNTC LootBag) to cut and paste records from your LootBag or whatever into other containers, Creatures Altered/Killed by Player and NPCs altered or killed by player to clean up some corpses by deleting records, and if you really know what you are doing you can do a search through the Cells to clean up things you left behind on the floor, though it makes things a lot easier when they are lumped together in containers. Maybe more on this later.
A warning: Deleting records with Enchanted Editor can take a long time for large savefiles!

Aside from that, I'll leave you on your own for the actual savehacking. Feel free to contribute to the scene and share your experiences or knowledge!

After you have modified your save, however, if you just copy it back to your Xbox as it is it will not work. Why? All game save files on the Xbox have computer "signatures" to make sure they were not tinkered with or corrupted. There are two solutions for this:
1) Calculate the new signature for the file, and update it. This works for any save file on modded or unmodded Xboxes.
2) Hack the XBE file to not check signatures. This is only possible if you are running a modded xbox with Morrowind ripped to the hard drive.
I might post a tutorial on option number 2 later, but for now, lets stick with option number 1.
First, you will need to go to the directory where you presumably installed XSavSig, and open up the resign.ini file in a text editor like Notepad. Add one of these entries (or both if you want) to the file depending on what version of the game you own:

[42530001]
ID=42530001
Title=Morrowind
AuthKey=43CEAEEA15CE142AD396C448C81C6F9355BD559E
DataFile=yournamehere.ess

[42530005]
ID=42530005
Title=Morrowind Game Of The Year
AuthKey=C0E2D29B509DDE874E5AB749B4CD1C1A
DataFile=yournamehere.ess

where yournamehere is replaced by the actual name of your save. Put your modified ess file into the temp folder in XSavSig (if it doesn't exist yet, make a "temp" folder in your xsavsig folder), then run XSavSig. Select your version of Morrowind from the list and it will give you the current signature (not valid, ignore it) and the calculated signature. Now, open up vv.dat with your Hex Editor and overwrite the first 20 bytes of this file with the signature calculated by XSavSig (a byte is 2 hex digits). Save vv.dat, transfer your ess file and vv.dat back to your Xbox into the folder you got it from and you're finally done! If it worked, give yourself a pat on the back :D
If not, fire off a message so I can help you and / or see if the guide needs to be revised.

Enjoy!

roofus