Crusader Kings 3 Ruler Designer Dna
Cilinia Looker
How do I create a custom character in Crusader Kings 3? Upon its initial release, Crusader Kings 3 had quite limited character customisation options compared to its predecessor, only allowing you to edit existing rulers and their family members via the Barbershop. However, the Version 1.2 update in November 2020 re-added (for free, no less) the popular Ruler Designer, which gives you more options for creating a brand-new character from scratch.
To access Ruler Designer, you need to first begin a new game of Crusader Kings 3 in a time period of your choosing and pick a pre-existing ruler you want to replace with your own character. Select the historical figure you want to oust from the world map and choose the 'Create your own Ruler' option. This will generate a random custom character and take you to the Ruler Designer, where you can tweak them to your heart's content.
You're free to customise as many characters as you want, but achievements will be disabled for a save file that contains two or more custom characters (to prevent you from engineering an easy victory for yourself). However, saves with a single custom character still allow you to unlock achievements, regardless of whether you end up playing as your custom character or as a historical character on the same map.
For a solid example of the ludicrous possibilities of Ruler Designer, I recommend checking out our pal Nate's feature series documenting what happened when he set every stat to max to create Gigaknight Excelsior, the Maximum King.
While nowhere near as robust as the Ruler Designer, the Barbershop allows you to change the clothing, hair, hat, and beard of your family members (the beard option is unfortunately only available for male family members).
It's not nearly as thorough as the Ruler Designer, but the Barbershop is hours of fun if you like putting all your kings and emperors in nightgowns or prison clothes and giving them all the largest crowns you can get your hands on.
If you're new to Crusader Kings 3, be sure to check out our beginners' tips and tricks page to help you get started with this dauntingly deep historical strategy game. We've also put together some advice for you on choosing your starting character... assuming that you don't just want to steamroller the whole history book and start afresh with your own version of King Gigaknight, of course.
I had started playing Crusader Kings II again and like every other time before it, I always get to the point when I want to mess up with my ruler, i.e. cheat a bit. And by a bit, I mean a whole lot. Nothing short of the most over powered ruler possible is acceptable. Even though the game provides all the in-game cheat commands necessary to achieve this, it is not as easy as one may think. You can easily set the age of any character and change their stats, but their traits need to be added one by one. The list of good and bad traits is a long one, and you have to do a bit of searching for it on the web or by finding the right plain-text file in the game configuration folder that defines these traits (and then making sure you only add the good ones). This is further complicated if you happen to use any of the popular mods for CKII (e.g. Lux Invicta) that more than doubles the list of ruler traits. Furthermore, the cheat command requires you to input the ID of the trait, not its display name in game. For the vanilla game, I think these two values coincide most of the time, but that is certainly not the case for mods. There are plenty of situations where the ID of the trait is either a synonym word for it or worse, a misspelling. So there is no escape, you have to find the configuration files that define the traits for every mod and dig in. There must be a better way!
We end up with a function that goes over all the stats and traits and computes the value for the age, but it always returns 16 at the end. This function is used by user interface to display the age number, to display your portrait based on age, and to let you click on the Finish button. After the change above, I could do this in my designer and the age remains at 16:
Since this part of the function is unlikely to change with game updates, you can right away just search for those opcodes plus bytes I just NOP-ed out and do it again. I believe Cheat Engine allows you to write a very small and simple LUA script to do that, so next time you fire up the game and cheat engine, you just execute the script and be done with it. Similarly, you can write a small program (a trainer) that does the same thing.
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