Hello all, I'm new here. I just rediscovered Freelancer after many long years. I had a good time playing through the story, but one thing that really bothered me is how the story mode messes with your reputation with the various factions to the point that earning reputation during the story is essentially meaningless. It makes sense for Liberty's peacekeeping factions to turn hostile when you get publicly shitlisted by all of Liberty in-story, it makes sense for the Rheinland Military to become hostile once you start openly fighting them in-story, and it makes sense for various criminal factions to become neutral or friendly when the story requires you to cooperate with them. But the other scripted reputation changes feel excessive. The first mission in the Bretonia arc resets your reputation with the Bretonia Police and Armed Forces back to neutral for some reason. After one late mission, nearly every faction becomes hostile except for certain criminal gangs and a small handful of other factions. And when you finish the story, your reputation with nearly every faction (if not all of them) is changed to what appears to be the default values. I'm really not a fan of this. I spent a lot of time and credits trying to build up my reputation as I went through the story, and with it effectively being reset at the end of the story, it feels like all that effort was pointless.

So I ask, is there a mod that tones down those story-based reputation changes to not effectively reset everything towards the end? If not, could one feasibly be made without being too much of a hassle? Ideally, the only reputation changes I'd want to happen as a result of story progress are the ones that I said "made sense" up above, as well as Liberty peacekeepers/Rheinland Military becoming friendly/neutral again at the end of the story.

Thanks in advance to anybody who can help me out with this. I greatly appreciate it!

Assuming you've got JFLP (or otherwise decoded files) search the mission files DATA\MISSIONS\*\m*.ini for SetRep, then figure out which ones you want to comment out...

JFLP is a patch to fix some things (in particular, it provides widescreen support); it also replaces the original binary-encoded *.ini files with their text equivalents, for easy editing.

The mission files are stored in folder DATA\MISSIONS where you installed Freelancer. The individual missions are in individual directories, e.g. M13\m13.ini.

Using a text editor (Notepad will do in a pinch, but you might like something with a bit more oomph - Notepad++ seems pretty popular) you can edit those files, searching for SetRep (more specifically Act_SetRep). This is the command that changes your reputation with a faction. If you place a semicolon in front of the line (;Act_SetRep ...) it will comment that line out, thus leaving your reputation with that faction unchanged.

Then it's a matter of determining which factions in which missions you want to preserve/comment.

Here's a factions list, relating the nicknames to the name.

Whats the error? Usually the issue is:

You will need to right click and "Run as Admin" for the patch if installing to Program Files.

A while ago I played with Act_SetRep to see whether it can be used to change faction-to-faction reputations. The result was negative. This surprised me because faction-to-faction reputations are stored in save files, which may suggest the possibility for them to be changed during the storyline.

Anyone else looked into this? Did I miss something?