Shadow Keeper is an application that allows you to edit your Baldur's Gate II - Shadows of Amn saved game files. How the editor is used is really up to you. Some people use editors like this for beefing up their characters, some use them for recreating actual D&D characters to play in the game and some just to goof around. The point of the editor is to allow you to have fun playing the game however you like it best.

One thing to keep in mind, if you haven't already played through the game and you plan to make supermen out of your party members, you will most likely kill most of the fun of the game. A game without challenges grows boring fairly quickly.

News

Fixed a bug with item resource names, causing SK to sometimes come up with an invalid name where it shouldn't. In particular, the dart item created by the Cloak of Stars was brought to my attention as not working.

July 23, 2001 - Version 2.1.3

Added some text to the bottom of the open game dialog that says Auto and Quick saves will not show up in the list.

There is an option in under Settings|Misc that will allow you to edit Quick and Auto Saves. It is off by default. If you do turn this on, don't email me about not having a save to fall back on if your edits go bad and you end up overwriting your clean copy in the game.

July 18, 2001 - Version 2.1.2

Very minor change: Quick Saves and Auto Saves will no longer show up in the Open Game dialog. The problem with having them there was that people would edit a game, go back to playing, and a few minutes later overwrite their clean backup copy before the edits.

July 16, 2001 - Version 2.1.1

Added affect item "Class Ability" (0x139) to the list.

Added script name references to the spell browser and affects list.

July 15, 2001 - Version 2.1.0

Make sure you overwrite your ULD files when you unzip this version as there have been some changes on how those are used.

Fixed portrait reading for ToB. There are a few portraits that were not showing up.

The values for the Racial Enemy are now retrieved from a 2DA resource. You can still add your own values to the user list.

The proficiency list is now retrieved from a 2DA resource. Like above, you can still add your own values to the user list.

ToB character files (CHR) can now be opened. If you had turned on the option to ignore version numbers you might want to go turn that back off now that the editor will read them.

The Wild Mage has been added to the Kit list.

Quantities/Charges have been changed in the inventory list. You can now assign all of the charges for items with multiple abilities. All three charge values are shown in the list.

The Enemy/Ally flag has been added to the Characteristics tab.

There is a new tab that shows the character's state flags. This includes death and the manner of the death. I haven't tried, but it may be possible to resurrect characters who have suffered permanent death by removing the state flag. These flags are shown in a multi-selection list. Use the standard windows multi-selection methods for assigning more than one.

Text matching has been added to all of the browsers. This includes the ability to search for text in the description of a spell or item.

The affects list has changed to include a name for the type. There is a new user list to declare the Value to Name associations.

You can now assign/remove Innate abilities based on a kit. A Kit button can be found on the Innate tab. Adding abilities is cummulative. If you apply the same kit three times you will get all of the abilities added three times. Removing abilities works a little differently and just removes the ability entirely; rather than decrementing the times it can be used.

June 20, 2001 - Version 2.0.4

Fixed another issue with ToB. I still don't have ToB so I can't verify for myself, but I have heard back that this version works with the expansion.

There is a new option in the Settings|Misc menu that lets you turn off version checking of the resources that the editor loads. This will allow for future changes in the engine's version numbering that don't actually change the format of the files. Turning on the ignore option will make SK attempt to load a resource even when it doesn't recognize the version number.

June 18, 2001 - Version 2.0.3

Fixed a bug that prevented the editor from reading IDS files from the override directory. ToB apparently installs some new versions of IDS files so you will need this release of the editor for ToB.

The hit point edit controls now allow negative numbers.

There is a new option in the Tools menu that checks the number of spells memorized per level against the values on the Memorization tab. This should be used as a guide rather than absolute values. There are times when having more memorized than the tab says are allowed is ok - items may increase the value possible without changing the memorization table. There are probably other cases as well.

If you hold the CONTROL key down when pushing the Clear/Remove button in the lists it will remove all the items from the list.

May 27, 2001 - Version 2.0.2

Saving a character that had a spell in their list where that spell didn't actually exist in the database caused the editor to crash. Now if a spell is found that doesn't exist you will be told about the fact and the spell is removed from that character.

I took the name length validation off. You can still only type a name as long as 20 characters; it just won't warn you. This gets rid of the problem where picking a String Reference greater than 20 characters caused that warning to appear.

Current Hit Points have been added to the Abilities tab.

Experience for killing has been added to the Abilities tab.

May 19, 2001 - Version 2.0.1

You can now view CRE resources without the editor automatically extracting them to your Override folder.

Added a Delete button to the Creature Browser. You can only delete Custom and Overridden CREs.

Made all the browser buttons consistent. They should all say 'Extract' now to save a version of the resource to your override folder. Before some said Export and some Extract.

Saving a CRE now updates the Creature Browser if you have it open. This takes a little longer to save a CRE than normal, but the list needs to stay up to date to make sure you edit the right version of the file. This will only happen when you first save a CRE that has not yet been extracted, or you save a CRE to a different filename.

When the Creature Browser refreshes it now remembers what the last item you had selected was and reselects it and makes it visible.

Fixed a bug in the inventory window that caused items to not show up in the list if they didn't have a picture associated with them.

May 15, 2001 - Version 2.0.0

Added support for editing CRE files.

Added a Creature Browser.

New tab: Appearances. The appearance select has been moved from the Characteristics tab to this one. Color selections can be found here now.

The Open Character dialog has the character portraits visible now.

Took most of the range restrictions off of the Abilities tab.

The Gender, Race and Class lists have been changed to read from the game's files. There are many more items in the list now to support CRE editing. This changes the use of the ULD files for these lists. The lists are still there but should now only have additions to the main list.

There are two new options in the Settings menu to control how the saving of CHR and CRE files are handled.

Names of NPCs can now be set. Due to how the game resources are set up, you can only change the name to a string already in the data files. If you use a utility that allows you to add your own strings to the game you will be able to select them in the editor.

There is a "To CRE" converter that can be found on the Tools menu. You can convert any CHR files or PC/NPCs in the saved games to CRE resources.

April 16, 2001 - Version 1.7.1

Problems with the editor not finding the .ULD files have been addressed. It shouldn't matter what your startup directory is anymore -- the editor will set it back to wherever the executable is. If it still can't find the .ULD files it will let you know and exit.

April 12, 2001 - Version 1.7.0

The "known value" lists of the editor are now editable.

I changed the way NPC names are handled in the editor. Now when viewing a NPC the name will be greyed out. You were not able to change the actual name anyway. The real name for the NPC is also shown now; rather than those sometimes cryptic blurbs of text found in the character files.

The links in the about box can be clicked on now - making it easier to visit those sites.

Fixed a bug with the transparent color when displaying icons.

December 14, 2000 - Version 1.6.3

Extraction of small character portraits was not working properly - Fixed.

December 8, 2000 - Version 1.6.2

Fixed a bug with fetching item text (names and descriptions). As far as I know, this was only causing problems on the Polish version of BGII.

November 28, 2000 - Version 1.6.1

For the list seen when editing an affect I changed the name of the item in the list to Local Variable Name where it used to say 'Unknown.'

Raised the limit for the number of times you can set a spell as memorized to 50.

This is the final version I plan to make of Shadow Keeper. If any major problems pop up I'll correct them, but I doubt I'll be adding any new features. I started the editor while I was on vacation and had lots of time to work on it. Lately I haven't had much time at all. The source code for the editor is available at the bottom of this page.

October 28, 2000 - Version 1.6.0

Added editing of exported characters.

Added global variables.

Changed the affects listing a little. I had a bunch of bytes marked as double words that should have been text. Local variables in a character's affects are a little eaiser to read and spot now.

The lists on the characteristics tab now will support any value you want to put there. If you put in a value that is not in the list, the drop down will still turn grey, but you can edit the values using the buttons to the right of the dropdowns.

October 25, 2000 - Version 1.5.1

Fixed a bug where closing down the character editing window didn't inform the browsers of the fact. If after closing a browser you pushed the Assign button it would crash the editor.

The item and spell browsers are now resizable.

October 21, 2000 - Version 1.5.0

Added support for the character affect records. Please take a look at the Readme.doc before editing these.

Added Readme.doc to the zip. You can view the file from the help menu in the editor. Even if you are already familiar with the editor it probably wouldn't hurt to take a quick look through the document. Some of the information in it is from this web page, but I've also added a few other areas and some tips on what to do if your games don't load after editing.

October 16, 2000 - Version 1.4.4

If you have the Heal Party on Save option enabled the editor will no longer lower your hp down to your base maximum if you have hit point enhancements on.

There are now buttons on the spell and item browsers to extract the resources.

The settings menu was changed a little bit. There is a new option which will allow you to turn on row and column lines in the list controls.

You can now set the quantity on any item in the inventory list. I had originally restricted the setting of quantity to stackable items and wands but there are other items which can have charges as well.

October 12, 2000 - Version 1.4.3

I removed the code that raised your max spells memorizable automatically. That turned out to be a bad idea. Thanks for the various emails I received explaining the symptoms. Since the editor doesn't take into account that you might have bonuses to your max memorizable spells per level, it would raise your max to accommodate what you actually had memorized. Then the game would see you could memorize the new number of spells and apply the bonus to the top of that. Use caution when assigning spells to your characters, if you go over what the game thinks you should be able to memorize it will often lock up or crash when loading or leveling. If you want to be able to memorize more spells, you can increase the numbers yourself on the Memorization tab.

October 11, 2000 - Version 1.4.2

Corrected a bug introduced in 1.4.1 that caused the number of spells available to be cast by sorcerers to go way up when saving.

October 10, 2000 - Version 1.4.1

Fixed a bug with the spell sequencer spell. If one of your characters had a spell sequencer active, the editor would corrupt the saved game file on saving.

The editor will now automatically bump up the number of spells you are allowed to memorize if you assign more than the memorization tab shows.

Fixed the THAC0 display. It should properly show negative values now.

Added item and spell description options when exporting either of those lists.

October 7, 2000 - Version 1.4.0

Fixed a bug with my idle code. It was causing the editor to eat up all available CPU time. If you noticed your system was lagged while running the editor, this was why.

Added out of party character editing. NPCs that are not part of your party are still stored in your saved game files. Some of these entries are a little strange looking and some are duplicates. I don't know what they all do, nor do I know if editing these is a good idea. One thing I did find that was interesting, your familiar is stored here as well. I was able to edit some new spells and innates in for the familiar and didn't notice any ill effects from it.

Added Tiefling to the list of races.

Item and spell lists can now be exported to comma-delimited text files. It exports the same items in the same order that you see in the list. So in the case of the item list if you wanted a list of just swords, use the filter before exporting. Since this only exports items in the list, you won't see any of the items the lists have rejected.

October 4, 2000 - Version 1.3.0

Added portrait changing (both PCs and NPCs). When you press the Change Portrait button you'll get a list of all the portraits available in the game as well as any valid portraits in your Portraits folder. I put two Extract buttons on the portrait selection dialog. The Extract buttons let you pull the bitmaps out of the game and place them into your Portraits folder. You will have to change the name of them if you want to be able to use them after editing because the game will keep finding the internal versions. It will probably also work to keep the names the same and place the bitmaps into your override directory.

October 3, 2000 - Version 1.2.5

Added reputation. It appears that when in a party the characters share a common party-reputation. Any time you change the reputation of a party member I'm setting the same reputation to all party member as well as the reputation of the party. Keep that in mind when editing the reputation of a character -- it is really the party reputation and you cannot set character reputations to individual values.

I've heard that you cannot resurrect a dead character if they have a value for current hit points. This caused a problem when Shadow Keeper would restore hit points on save as it didn't check to see if the character was dead. Now if a character is dead it will set the current hit points to 0. This should fix the bug as well as fix any characters that were changed by the editor previously. If you have this problem just load up a game and resave it.

Removed Lore from the editor since it seems it is tied to your character's level rather than directly used from the file.

October 2, 2000 - Version 1.2.4

Club proficiencies were not working.

I added the direct editing of all your character levels. I don't recommend editing these though. If you want to increase your level, give yourself some experience points and let the game level you up. Your first class with a dual-class character is an exception to this since they don't gain levels anymore in their original class.

If you didn't have any single or multiplayer games and tried to view a list of them you would see an error message. I took the error out.

The minimum you can set your abilities to is now 1, to accomodate orcs.

Added a menu option, "Open, Default Single Player" to the settings menu. This controls what type of games initially are shown in the Open Saved Game dialog.

September 29, 2000 - Version 1.2.3

Had a bug with filling the list of racial enemies for rangers. It was only listing from G or H on. All of them should be visible now.

September 29, 2000 - Version 1.2.2

Added editing of a character's movement speed. I haven't played a monk, but rumor has it there is a bug that removes some of a monk's natural speed increase at some point. This is the same item that the monk class uses and can be used to correct that issue.

September 28, 2000 - Version 1.2.1

I wasn't checking the headers on BIF files. If you happened to have a compressed bif in your DATA directory the editor would hang. Corrected now.

Fixed the druid and cleric kit settings. I had them reversed.

Added the new thief skills.

For dual-class characters you can now edit your first class level. The level is found on the abilities tab. It will only show up for dual-class characters.

September 28, 2000 - Version 1.2.0

Proficiencies are in.

I had a limit on thieving abilities that was way too low. You can now put values in as big as the save file allows (0-255).

September 27, 2000 - Version 1.1.0

Added the ranger's racial enemies.

Added the half-orc race.

Added the sorcerer and monk classes. See my notes below for Barbarians.

Added an item filter. A few people requested that my filter in Dale Keeper be more specific. I've broken the filter down into each of the item types rather than the broad groups I had.

Added the kits. I tested the kits, but only in their correct class assignments. I don't know what will happen if you say make a priest and assign him a thief kit. Barbarians are a little misleading. They are actually a kit although the manual and character creation screens make it look like it is its own class. A babarian is a kit for a fighter.

September 25, 2000 - Version 1.0.0

The first version of the editor is available to be downloaded. This is a modified version of Dale Keeper, I liked the interface on that one and wanted to keep it the same. If you notice any reference to Dale Keeper in the editor please let me know so I can change it (I think I got them all though). Since this first version is just a conversion of Dale Keeper there are no BGII specific items in the editor yet (like kits).

I have tested the editor, but not very thoroughly. I did some tests for each of sections and I believe they are all now working properly. BGII's files are a little different from IWD though, so if you encounter any problems please let me know. I'll fix them as soon as I can.

BGII has a huge amount of spell resources compared to IWD. If the editor is taking too long to load there is an option under Settings|Spells that will disable the use of spell icons. You will still see the icons in the spell browser, just not when you look at your characters.

Proficiencies are currently disabled. I'll try to get those in by tomorrow.

The filter on the item browser is currently disabled.

Using Shadow Keeper

Locating Shadows of Amn Installation:

It doesn't matter where you unzip Shadow Keeper. The first time Shadow Keeper runs it will try to locate your Shadows of Amn installation. It does this by first looking in your registry. If the registry entry is missing it will search all your fixed disks for the default installation path. If it still cannot find where you have it installed, you'll have to go in and set the path by hand. You can set the installtion path from the Settings menu item. You can either type in the path or use the Browse button to locate the game.

Opening a Saved Game:

To open a saved game you can either use the shortcut Ctrl+O or go to the File menu item and select Open. The list defaults to single player saved games. There is a checkbox on the dialog for displaying multiplayer saved game. The list is initially in order of most recently saved. The game listing can be sorted by clicking the column headers. To the right of the game listing is the tiny screenshot of where you saved your game.

Party Navigation:

When a saved game has been opened you should see a screen similar to the one at the top of this page. The current character being edited has their name in the edit control on the left side, as well as their portrait. To flip through any other party members you might have you can either use the scrollbar below the portrait or the shortcut keys Ctrl+RightArrow and Ctrl+LeftArrow. To navigate through the tabs to the right of the character's portrait use PageUp and PageDown. Also, there are underlined letters on the tabs. You can press Ctrl+<the underlined letter> to go directly to that tab.

Saving Your Changes:

Shadow Keeper won't overwrite saved game files. Instead, it creates a new saved game. If something does go wrong with the editing, you can always go back to the version before you made the changes. When you save the game, Shadow Keeper takes the original name and adds '(Edited 0001)' to the end of it. Each time you save the game, it increments the number in parenthesis. This provides an easy way to spot which games you have edited and which are the most recent edits. However, you are given an opportunity to name the new saved game whatever you like.

Editing Inventory:

First off, not all of the items in the item browser were meant to be put into your inventory. If an item is missing an icon or description, it probably wasn't meant to be placed into a character's inventory. The editor will let you do it, but I don't know how the game will react to it.

The inventory tab on the saved game window and the item browser are tied together for editing character inventories. There is a button on the item browser that assigns the selected item to the character being edited. As you scroll through items in a character's inventory, you'll see the text on this button change. You can also just double click an item in the item browser list to assign it to a character.

The inventory tab of the saved game window has a list of all the possible positions that a character can carry an item. There are five buttons at the bottom of the list.

• Change Item - Lets you replace an existing item, or add an item to an empty position. Double clicking an item in the list does the same thing as pushing the button. The item browser is opened and if there was an item at that position, it is selected in the list.
• Clear Item - Deletes an item from your inventory.
• Set Qty - Sets the quantity of a stackable item.
• Set All Qty - Sets the quantity of all stackable items in your inventory.
• ID - Identifies all unknown items in your inventory.

If you are going to be editing a lot of items, don't close the item browser. When the item browser starts up it has to fill its list with all the items in the game. This doesn't take a long time, but it is noticable. Rather than closing the window, just minimize it or click on the saved game window to go back to editing the saved game.

Download Shadow Keeper

Shadow Keeper Source Code This is the source code for the editor, not the compiled program. If you are looking to download the editor for use in editing games, use the link above. This is a Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 project file.