How do I remove races?

[Spikey]

Ok this may make me look like an idiot but here goes ..

I have been fiddling with the editor for a few days, I don't want to start from scratch - just tweak the savage worlds package for my own home brew game. I have added a bunch of home brew / alternative races. All works fine - when I load HeroLab and select my game the list of races includes all those packaged with the license and all those I have added.

I want to remove some of the standard/default races that are part of the original Savage worlds game system, which are displayed when the user clicks on races (and has the show races option ticked). the standard dwarves and elves and orcs which are (obviously) not listed under races in my file (spikey.user) but are still automatically read by Herolab from the standard thing_races.dat file.

However I cannot edit the thing_races.dat file in my alternative game system folder as I still get the "this is a core game system file. editing this file could damage the game system, causing it to becoem unable to load. you may view the contents of the file, but not modify it." message. If i open that it does not have the delete option for individual races.

Can anyboy point out what I am certain is an obvious step i missed to edit the races so only those I want to appear actually do so? is there something i forgot to do to make the races file editable? That way i could just remove what i don't want and copy mine into that file. I assume ...

[rob]

Definitely not an idiot, as doing this isn't necessarily obvious. There are two ways to do this....

The first option is to rename the "thing_races.dat" file to "thing_races.user" and then edit it as you see fit. Deleting races shouldn't cause any problems, so this would be a safe option. The major drawback with this approach is that any future updates to the Savage Worlds data files would cause a problem, since the "thing_races.dat" file will again appear. So you would need to fold any changes to that file into your version and then delete the file. That's annoying.

The other option is to simply mark the things as "hidden". Using the Editor, open the "spikey.user" data file. Go to the Hidden tab. Create new entries for each of the races that you want to remove, specifying the unique of each. Save your changes and then reload the data files. The races you designated as hidden should no longer appear anywhere. Hero Lab treats them as being non-existent, even though they technically still reside within the core data files. Using this approach, any new updates that you install will all simply work, without any annoying need to edit files each time.

Hope this helps....

[Spikey]

Thank you thank you, a thousand times thank you. Much appreciated.