Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Honour Mode Ruleset turned itself off - how to turn on again?

18 days ago, and 36 in-game hours ago, me and my GF started a new BG3 run, and we specifically wanted to run it under the Honour Ruleset. Said and done, we went through the custom difficulty options, and started a game. We both double- and triple-checked to make sure that the Honour Ruleset was set to being on, and discussed the implications, looking forward to a very different kind of run (partially due to the honour rulset, but especially because we're also running a radically different party that should see the issues with the honour ruleset exacerbated, which is what we wanted).

We just reached Aunt Ethel, the first enemy that we knew should hit us with Honour Ruleset specials, and.. nothing.

I for the first time check the "Difficulty" tab since before starting the game, and 'lo and behold, it says Standard Ruleset.

I load the first save, all the way back on the Nautiloid, and look at that, it says Standard Ruleset.

I want to stress that we are both 100% sure that we did not start this as a Standard Ruleset-run, meaning that it either never activated, or have somehow reset for the entire "session" of savegames (perhaps in addition to now being sorted under her character's name - Aerith - rather than mine, which is the name of the save folders - Urgthariel.

Obviously, the standard is that you cannot change the ruleset once the game has started, likely because of potential wonkyness, but we all know that ultimately, the difference in ruleset is just whether the game loads another "mod" or not, as well as some area-specific flags that won't fire unless the game is "set" to the "right" difficulty.

So how do we fix this? Going back 18 days and restarting is obviously out of the question. I have modding experience, Norbyte, and the Script Extender's console (in lieu of an actual game console) at my disposal, although I don't foresee any great willingness to help me work using those tools in an official capacity. There has to be a flag to flick somewhere to work around this game-breaking bug.

I managed to fix it, but now I have to deal with this shit:


At first I thought "Hey, neat, they could've made the saves not load at all if altered, but instead they opted for just informing the player and then going away", but no - it keeps pestering me, even after creating a new save.

There is no need for this to keep showing up; I am well aware of the fact that the save has been tampered with, as I was the one that tampered with it. Informing the player and then letting them go about their business is the way to go, there's no need to be egregious and annoying about it, and this reeks of the same attitude that borked the in-game mod loading interface, except that this at least allows me to continue, which is nice, I guess.

Update: Nope, wasn't fixed, just a false positive - it immediately crashes for the partner when joining.

Still looking for a solution.

I want to add my voice to this: Please add a setting to activate Honour Mode rules in existing saves in custom mode in general. I would like to add Legendary Actions to enemies in my custom mode save, since I wasn't aware of them when I started the save.

I share the sentiment, but just to be clear, my voice in this is a support request, not a feature request.

The reason they don't allow someone to activate the honour mode ruleset in-game is because it essentially entails tacking a form of mod onto the end (which is awful in its own right; it should be up near the top for moddability, but that's a separate issue) of the load order for a save, along with a flag for the difficulty, which at the very least necessitates a restart, whereas the regular difficulty settings don't do that. It is entirely possible that the game does not have the ability to do that at runtime, which would necessitate some kind of main-menu difficulty-switching interface (which, to be fair, would be pretty much 90% done now when they have the whole modding thing tacked into the machinery, but one cannot help but to think that adding this for difficulty-switching stuff would've been a better use of time than the awful centralized/curated modding stuff).

From that perspective, it is perfectly understandable that the honour mode ruleset cannot be activated in-game.

However, when the game bugs out, there needs to be a solution to the problem, and I have as of yet been unable to find one.

Extracting a save using Norbyte's LSLib v1.19.5 is easy, using the PAK/LSV tab's function for extracting packages, .lsv being the packaged save format. This allows us to see and modify the files contained within a save. Using the LSX/LSB/LSF/LSJ Tools tab, we can then convert Globals.lsf to Globals.lsx, and meta.lsf to meta.lsx, allowing us to easily edit the files in Notepad++, and then convert the .lsx files back to .lsv files (and then deleting the .lsx files, obviously).

The problem arises that no matter what way we then re-package the extracted folder into an .lsv save file (using "Create Package"), the game screams "Warning! The savegame has detected tampering or corruption. It is strongly advised that you do not continue on this savegame." upon loading the save, and while the save will function just fine (including the changes to activate Honour Ruleset), it will continue to complain upon every load (persisting through new saves), and if another played tries to join the game, it will crash the game for them.

This happens regardless of whether we make any changes to the actual files contained - merely unpacking and repackaging the save causes this, regardless of what compression we use - No Compression, Zlib Fast, Zlib Optimal, LZ4, LZ4 HC, ZStd Fast, ZStd Optimal, or ZStd Max.

For reference, these are the changes that needs to be done to (re-)activate Honour Ruleset:

In SaveInfo.json, there is a section that looks something like this:
and it needs to be changed into:

Then, in meta.lsx/.lsf, there is a section called "ModuleSettings" under the initial MetaData section. The ModuleSettings section contains the "Mods" section, followed by a number of nodes (the first of which will be named "GustavDev"). At the very end of this list of these nodes, we need to add this node:

Scroll down past the mods and a bit further, and we have the following section that looks something like this:
This needs to be replaced with:

Next, we need to open up Globals.lsx/.lsf. First thing we'll see is another long list of "Mods" (well, for me it's long, it may actually be quite short for others). Just like in the meta file, the following node goes last in the list:

And that's it!

Unfortunately, until we find a way to repackage the saves without the game going bananas, it doesn't help much, but I did this write-up for support reference.

Since this thread/technical section seems dead in the water and my own investigation is at an impasse, I've escalated this to Support, providing them with my saves, and hopefully they'll be able to sort it out.

It should be exceptionally easy for anyone with the right tools at their disposal. Quick 5-minute adventure, in and out.

When push comes to shove, all that is actually necessary is to set "Difficulty" to "RulesetHonour" in SaveInfo.json and replace any "Rulesets" nodes in the meta.lsf/.lsx file with the one Rulesets node with the value of "5d595a7a-6182-4559-b404-ed7cc7ad8ada". It's practically just two small lines of code.

All the other changes could then be introduced by just putting it in manually in the regular modsettings.lsx file, which will then "imprint" on the save.

I feel like something as trivial as this should be achievable with scripting using the Script Extender, but that is above my pay grade and I have absolutely no idea who to ask, and I am shadowbanned on Github for some reason, so I can't ping Norbyte about the repackaging issue on v4.1.1.6072089 saves "corrupting" files.

why is restarting out of the question... you want an honour mode game with the GF = earn it

That’s not a helpful comment. I’d suggest folk who don’t have anything constructive or at least friendly to add to the discussion perhaps resist the temptation to chip in.

What is there to "earn"? We've been playing for 20 days and we're 40 hours into our current game. This is not a matter of some lame internet credentials, but the game malfunctioning and us trying to fix it. The reason it's out of the question is plainly because we have no desire to spend the entire upcoming vacation retreading ground and having to recall exactly who did exactly what and when, and in which order, and then reload or manually manipulate the rolls on every variable (which includes hidden automatic conversation/interaction rolls), in a game where the experience and outcomes constitute a fairly complex weave.

Even something as simple as releasing Sazza turns out differently if you smuggle her out through the tunnels before you've cleared them or not. And walking up to the gates of Moonhaven similarly turns out differently based on your interactions with Aradin or whether you go there immediately after releasing Sazza or not. So if you want the same experience, you need to do the exact same things again, and there is no telling beforehand what the butterfly effect of previous decisions are.

I cannot think about anything more pathetic than "earning" some kind of participation award in a singleplayer/co-op game, let alone parade that participation trophy as something that "should" even have to be earned from the game bugging out.

Given how easy this is to fix, I have high hopes that someone in support can take the 5 minutes it would take to fix it and fork some fixed saves over like father Christmas.

Let’s drop it please. Ussnorway’s comment wasn’t on, but I’d already called that out. And implicit in our forum rule that people should drop a topic when requested by a moderator is that once a moderator has weighed in, people should move on.

No update on this from Support since Thursday. There wasn't a Belgian holiday on Friday and/or Monday, was there?

Hopefully the delay is nothing.

Since you have sent in a ticket report directly to Larian, just need to wait more they may have have a big que to sift through not to mention the holidays around the corner contributing to the waiting time, keep in mind that you might not get a timely response up until January or later if the que is big enough as they take the tickets as they come.

I'm talking about the potential of receiving thousands of tickets daily given how big of a hit the game became, many times when I 've sent one have always had a response sometimes it just took a long time to come around fully.

We had ongoing communication since the 11th, with multiple responses and replies over the first two days, and then just complete radio silence since my last reply to them. Having to wait for support is not uncommon, but it is eye-raising when an ongoing case just stops dead with no response.

Well, here's to Support being committed to absolute uselessness and not even endeavoring to minimum effort.

May they all be alone on Christmas and only get coal.

That’s out of order, Luckmann. I know you’re frustrated, but there’s no call to be nasty. Our forum rules explicitly say:

- Do not target any forum member, including the Development, Community, and Moderator teams, with harassment, abuse, threats, or toxicity.
- Do not mock, torment, or berate individuals for any reason.

Locking this thread as a result of this breach.