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

Quoted from the author's (Farren Hayden) savegame cleaning with Enchanted Editor guide. 1 block on the Xbox = 16,384 bytes, or 16 kb, this will most likely help with the 150 block savegame size problem.

The shit aint workin for me, man. I'm sure there's a way to do it, however... When I edit the save per your instructions, then hex its calculated code into the vv.dat file overwriting the first 40 characters with those 40 characters like you describe... I get a 'can not load save' error, or almost exactly those words.

One thing that's unclear is, you must choose between two ways before you upload the save back to your xbox. You have to either click cancel or ok in XSavSig, if you click ok or apply it resigns your save, if you click cancel, it does not. Do you want to hit ok and resign the gamesave, or do you want to cancel out and leave it like it is? Big difference. Also, do you know a way, with that editor, to remove being expelled from the temple?

i was mucking around with dis and all xasvsig does is changes the hex just like when u hex edit the vv.dat file. there has to be a way for this to work! post up how to hack the defualt.xbe so it doesnt check the signatures!!!!!! and i dont think that u can use that editor to remove getting expelled

Sorry about that, should have been more exact with my wording!

The resigning process for morrowind is quite different from other games. You do not want to click OK or APPLY when XSavSig calculates the new signature for the modified file. Instead, take this 40 character long string in the "calculated" box (20 bytes in hexadecimal, 2 characters per byte) and overwrite, in hexadecimal, the first 20 bytes of the file vv.dat. The vv.dat file should have come from the same folder as the ess file, and be 40 bytes long in total. There are two signatures in there actually, but the second signature we really don't care about. Just make sure you overwrite the first 20 bytes of this file with the calculated hex bytes, and you should be fine. Do not copy the characters as ascii text characters; this will not work. If all is well, you should only be rewriting half of vv.dat.

To start, I'll say thank you, because it was possible to unban a character from the temple this way. (Global Settings / ExpTemple) This is a helpful method, but it would be totally excellent if you'd post how to stop the signature checking altogether like you mentioned, if you know how. I've gotten this edit-then-resign method to work once out of several meticulous and stressful tries. Plus when I got it to work all I edited was un-expulsion.

Don't get me wrong, this guide is quite very helpful, but... It's a great idea to also do the other guide, because there's a shitty-ly stressful amount of dicking around for exactness every time - save the file in enchanted, avoid accidentally re-signing, type in a precise sequence of 40 characters 1 by 1, and then make sure to save the vv.dat file and transfer them both. Also, if you can't load the save, you don't know if the problem is from the morrowind editor or a typo in the 40 hex characters. 7 out of 10 times, no matter how carefully you check, you're liable to make at least one typo. Plus even after you spend an eternity to get it exactly right it still doesn't always work for some reason. With a .exe file that doesn't check signatures, it may be a lot of fecal semantics one time, but then all the bullshit is dealt with from then on. Just an encouragement to your idea earlier of posting a guide on removing sig-check alltogether. Once again, thanks because I was able to fix the expelled problem in the save.

Sure, will do. I have a few hacks for Default.xbe that can make Morrowind start up much faster (skips any intro videos and goes to main menu) and be able to launch modified (not resigned) saved from the main menu, but I didn't do it yet for Morrowind.xbe, so once in game, the load game function won't load "damaged" saves again.

I'll get right on hackin out the main save signature checks and post them both when I'm done.

i have already tried to hack the gamesave check but didn't get very far with it. my knowlage of assembly language is pretty limited, i look forward to using your hacks , could you post a small tutorial or the part of the code you edited ?, i would be interested to know where i was going wrong. cheers.

Xx-L-nt! If you run into some kind of ridiculous problem, then I think people will even applaud your effort to help. I'd be interested to see a section of the guide that even describes how to skip those videos since they're annoying as fuck, if you felt like adding that. But, I could do without it if it's too much writing for ya. The main thing is that it would just be real loveable to skip all that resigning crap.

(On a totally unrelated note, I heard that you can eventually own strongholds. I want to own these and be able to put belongings in them, but I want to delete all other cell nodes to shrink my save size. If anyone figures out which cells these are, that would be a great detail with this fantabulous guide.)

Thanks once again, roofus. I'm sure a number of peepulz appreciate your guide.

Hopeful,
Can't the computer version be used to locate the cells?
Even though the PC and X-box versions of the game are different, I'm pretty sure that the cell locations are the same. So why can't someone just locate them that way?


This was just a thought.

is it possible to make yourself invinceable?

Technically, you'd need a trainer for that... but you can get the next best thing, of being impossible to hit! Enchant any old item to forify agility 1 pt, constant effect... pop it open in the editor, change it to something obscene like 1000 points, and nothing can hit you anymore! Effectively invincible

kool, with this editor how come i cant change health?
and i got a fee more questions
(1) is it possible to create a gamesave via the editor?
(2)how do u change gold?
(3) how do i upload support files?
that it is all

You can change health, look around in there!

(1) Not without a Template.
(2) There is an item called Gold_001 in your current inventory, which is actually under NPCs Altered / Killed by player (NPCC), under NPCC PlayerSaveGame. Change the quantity of this to anything up to 4.2 billion, roughly (it is an integer value). You can also, if you wanted, manually add NPCO records to this section, and spawn items for yourself like a full suit of Daedric armor, for example . If you are running the GOTY edition, and it doesn't like the order your inventory's in, it will just correct itself usually by reordering the section that was messed up.
(3) If by support files you mean Mods for morrowind, Grifter66 has quite a few guides on this around this forum

the only place i can find health is file header- tes3 and player refr.

and wtf is process skill

sry for triple posting but i cant edit!
my xbox freezes after a bit it stops here LOADING
^
im its worst enemy after i edit my save, most of the time it does that.
i call it the EVIL i

I know that this game is old but still fun... Could some one please tell what i have to shange in the XBE so it noes not check sig.. plus skips the intros.... And i have the normal version not the GOTY.... Thanks you could email it to me if you dont mind

go to the hacking .xbe thread

I noticed that it's so much easier to just hack default.xbe to remove the sig checking and simply edit the gamesave with enchanted editor. It's a one for all type deal and you never have to worry about redoing the file check again.

Just thought i'd share...

That quick and dirty method of slimming your save seems not to work for me (DDE when loading) and I know it's not the signing hack in the xbe because I tried hacking the save before, only changing some player stats, and that worked.

Any sort of large scale deletion (Creatures Killed, NPCs Killed, Cells) seems to affect too many other things. I have tried deleting things with safe mode on and that still doesn't work (probably cause safe mode deletes even more things lol).

Changing my constant effect levitate ring to have a magnitude of 500 was fun though...

I really have to get my save smaller, 156 blocks is too big and gives me too many DDEs on mods.

Any help with this much appreciated

Pleas post a tut.... i cant get the signature thing to work, i need a work-around really badly. I have it on my HDD so a way to not check the vv.dat would be wonderful. Thanks ahead of time

Refer to the hacking default.xbe guide on the top of the forum. Changing bytes on it via hex editor will allow you to play hacked saves (game will not check sig) without the use of the xsig software

I'm going to contact roofus

Pasted from Default.xbe hacking guide:
This should work with PAL / NTSC GOTY edition Morrowind.
No Signature checking hack:
At offsett 27258 (6A7Ah) you should see 75 16. Change this to EB 16. Calculated signatures no longer need to match the saved signature, so hacked savegames can be loaded from the main menu!

Thank you roofus for taking the time to come back here to do this.

i need to know something.whenever i try to load up the ess.file ,the enchanted editer says that it is out of memory.this is very agrivating.since,i know how to do pretty much any thing on this .PLEASE HELP!

Nevermind. I tried a different save and it worked

Hi Everyone,

I appologise for having to start this topic over again but i am left with no other choice.

I have followed this topic closely and tried to the best of my abilities to comply with the instructions set out by roofus who has my thanks, my problem is two fold.

neither can i edit my save games via Enchated Editor as i keep receiving an "cannot load save game" message or similar and i cannot find the hex values mentioned in either of the tutorials on XBE hacking.

I am in england an am using a PAL version of the morrowind game, not the Game of the year edition, i know that my hex editing is precise but i just cannot get any of the tutorials from this site to work

the tools that i am using are Hexworkshop, Enchanted Editor, Xsavsig and Flash FXP with a PAL xbe of the game.

can anyone please help?

thanks.

Can anyone reccomend the limits for some of the stats? I've hacked the default.xbe to remove the save check, but it's still freezing on load. Thanks.

I think if you want to modify your stats, you should do it in game. Much safer, no headaches, and no limit. I've had my intelligence at 300,000 before. Quite handy, I tell ya. Oh yeah, and permenant if you know how to do it (just google for "Soultrap glitch").

Or you could do what I did to increase health. Set your Endurance skill very high then level up. The game bases your increased HPs off of what your endurance level is.

Also, for that unbanning the factions thing, I have to set it to 0, right? I did that for the Imperial Legion and I'm still expelled.

hey man,
your xbox save sig link aint workin.
can anyone post a link were i can get it?

i was puttsing (is that really a word?) around and bumped up my skills and attributes while i was still at level 1. now it seems to be taking forever and a day to move my charicter up to level 2.
did i screw myself, and am i going to have to move my skills back down to a normal level or something?

also i found where it has your HP in the save files, but changing it seems to do nothing in the game :shrug:
i assume i am changing it in the wrong place. can someone point me in the right direciton?

The maximum normal skill levels is 100. So if you set it higher than that, yeah, you are screwed. Your character levels everytime a major or minor skill raises ten levels, if you can't raise a skill, then you can't level.

that would make sense.

thanks the help

Here's a little cheat/glitch if you're looking to make a super-uber-destroy everything-God like-supreme bad ass character using the game's training "glitch" and EE.

Since you have ability to change your gold value, this shouldn't be a problem. There is a secret/master trainer in Caldera that trains the sneak ability. Ideally, what you want to do is (if you so choose), edit all your other skills EXCEPT for sneak. Also, when you create your character, make sure that sneak is either a major or minor skill. Now, once your train sneak, your level point will go up everytime your sneak skill increases...which means for every 10 skill points you earn, you increase a level.

The beauty about this is that even though your rating at skill is 100, you'll still be able to train as long as you want (provided you have the gold to spend). So in essence, for every 10 times that you train, you gain a level. It takes about a 2 seconds to go through the process. So, doing the math:

1 point X 2 seconds X 10 points = 20 seconds to level up

20 secs X 250 levels = 5000 seconds (which is 83 minuts or 1 hour and 23 minutes)

If you have the patience, you'll be at level 250 in no time. No go and slaughter a High Ordinator or two.

ah, dig it. that would make more sence.

is there any reason why when i change item in my inventory (excpet for gold) it reverts back to what it was7? is it stored in more than one place (somewhere other than under the NPC heading)? or does it check back with the containers/creatures altered fields?

When I edit the gold value it doesn't show up in the game....

I know I didn't edit things wrong because the changes I made to my characters appearance show up, just not the gold I added to it's inventory.

That is because you are edditing it in the wrong place. You need to edit it in the npc section where your character should be. And if that does not work then edit one of the other people in the game so that they have infinite money. If that works then go and kill him or her and take all of the gold. So it is basically the same thing. I hope this helps.

I recently started another topic which I think is sort of related to this one. I've been trying to XSavSig my vv.dat file to work with a save that has 2 copied items in it. I haven't had any problems with Enchanted Editor but once I get to putting the two files inside the zip and then trying to put the zip on my memory card via a USB Xbox controller that I made (with Action Replay) it keeps telling me that the Xbox Save isn't Valid. Any advice? Thanks in advance. I even started from scratch and took extra care to make sure I followed roofus's instructions to the t and it still doesn't work. Crap.

Yeah, I went to NPC's and then my character.....I don't really feel like trying what you said because it really doesn't matter as much to me now so w.e

Thats alright, I just wanted to help.

Ok please help me. I have tried everything. I have followed the instructions as closely as possible. I load the save game, it goes to about 2 and a half inches away from the end of the loading screen, then freezes. WTF am i doing wrong? Can anyone here help me? Not even minor changes work. plz help. I feel tempted to destroy my XBOX

I have posted this in another topic, but I think it would be more usefull in here.

O'k, I have figured out how to add to the inventory.

This guide has you adding inventory items under "Non Player Characters > NPC_player"

Changing stats, health, fatigue, magic and adding to inventory in this spot had no effect for me, I suspect that it is just a listing of your original stats and inventory.

To actually add to your inventory you have to go under:

"NPC's Altered/Killed by Player" (Some number will be here)
Then find
"NPCC PlayerSaveGame"

You will find it pulls up the current listing of everything your character has in thier inventory.
To add an item that you do not have simply:

Right click on "NPCC PlayerSaveGame" and chose "Insert Subrecord"
Then pick "NPCO"

It will appear on the bottom of the list, you only have to add what you want. The "..." is a browse, it makes picking what you want much easier. And the count is the amount of the items.

You probably already have gold in your inventory. Just change the "count" to whatever amount you want.

Thanks for the recommendation infomad.

Another way that you fully "exploit" (I know, wrong word to use) is to load either mods or the Morrowind.esm file itself to load and select ANY item within the game (weapons, books, artifacts, etc.).

For those starting a new game, normally this is what I do to create my Super-Uber Destroyer Character:

Before leaving the room where you pick up the dagger (in EE, this is the Chargen Dagger), try to pick up as much stuff as you can (plates, forks, food items, etc.) just make sure that your character is not over-encumbered. Now, after speaking to the Captain, go out and save your game. Exit, FTP your save file to your PC and start getting to work.

All the info on changing stats, gold, etc. are already covered in this tut so i'll leave those out. Here's a little "tweak" to the tut...on the Dependecies tab, load the main Morrowind.esm file and/or other mods that you may have installed (make sure they're "clean"). Now, in order to fully edit and modify your inventory, you can go the NPC Altered/Killed by Player. This is where you update your inventory. Why? Because your Character data is now “altered” and all the information will be stored here. You can even re-edit your Gold, amount of arrows you have and everthing else. Once you load Mods and/or Morrowind.esm, you can click on the … and it will bring up the window that will allow you to place ANYTHING in your Character’s inventory. Easy enough, right? Transfer your game back from your PC to your Xbox and have fun.

When I mod my save It shows up on my harddrive as a COMPLETLY didfrent save

its Like:

Morrowind:
Shadow Save
Morrowind:
Shadow Save Edit

how can I fix this?

one thing i wanna know is. Since people use KSE to edit KOTOR 1 and 2 save games, and since adding feats or changing inventory corrupts the save, wouldnt XSavSig help in this situation? if we knew what to put into the resign file to allow xsavsig to calculate teh hex values for vv.dat then it would make the save usable i think. By the way this method for morrowind works wonders for me.

I couldn't get the vv.dat and xsavsig to work for me so I hex edited default.xbe which worked fine. For simple stat editing I think the best tool is the "Morrowind Save Editor" by jimkeir on PlanetElderScrolls. I bumped my health to 15000, then all of my skills and attributes to 5000 except for Agility and Speed which I set to 500 along with Athletics and Acrobatics at 200. The editor wouldn't work on save-games with spaces in the file-name so I made sure to rename the saves before grabbing them over FTP.

Strength should probably be left at 500 or lower as one hit with Sunder will destroy the Heart of Lorkhan, and break the quest. It's pretty nice to have one hit kill otherwise.

I was able to use the Enchanted editor to create items but it seems like the NPCO entries had to be in both "Non Player Characters\NPC_Player" and "NPCs Altered/Killed by Player\NPCC PlayerSaveGame". With that in mind I created items for enchanting; 10 Azura's Stars and Exquisite Rings. I also added 2 Goldbrands and 30 Sirollus Saccus' Hammer for preferred weapon and repair. As was said before, it's probably easier to just grab some items into your inventory and then change them, rather than to create brand new NPCO entries.

I had no problem adding NPCS (spell) entries to "Non Player Characters\NPC_Player" so I loaded myself up with the best spells including Summon Golden Saint for filling the Azura's Stars for enchanting.

I believe the save I got was modded using this. "Archaic" mod save. I was going to see if I could use the PC Morrowind (which I don't have ATM.) The only deal I need it for is the Boethias Pillow book. I have the original Xbox morrowind GOTY an 8 MB memory card and the Action Replay save game USB transfer kit. If I can drop that in as hassle free as possible it'd be awesome. Other than that the archaic save has made me a ridiculous god. This is the only mission I've screwed up if its too difficult its no biggie.