User blog:Mrob27/For the Moon is Hollow, and I Have Changed the Sky

On the iPad, all of my moons have a green sky. I know it gives you random sky colours every time you create a new game, because I've gotten other colours on the iPhone (purple, orange, and red). But not the moons I care about:

I want to keep all 4 games on the iPad and certainly am not going to start over just to get a different colour sky. But this green sky thing is kind of boring.

In my blog on the Internal Data Format I mention that the sky colour is in a certain file, but I hadn't figured it out fully. Last week I worked on it a little more, and got far enough to at least be able to change the sky colour.

The procedure is:


 * Work out the filename of the game.dat file (for Moon A, it is "ce8e8bbdb9cecd758687feae89e910a232b5f03c")
 * Back up the iPad to iTunes. (You won't get anything if you are using Version_1.8.0 and also have iOS 5.0.1 or later, so forget the rest of this).
 * Copy the "ce8e8bb...03c" file and call it "mooncraft_0_game.dat.plist"
 * Use the Terminal and type the command "plutil -convert xml1 -e txt mooncraft_0_game.dat.plist"
 * Rename "mooncraft_0_game.dat.plist" to "mod_0_game.dat.txt", and edit it in TextEdit.
 * Near the end there are three numbers in a row. The middle one should be less than 360. For blue, I changed it to 246. This is a little bit towards violet, which I like.
 * Convert it back to a binary plist with "plutil -convert binary1 -e plist mod_0_game.dat.txt"
 * Take the "mod_0_game.dat.plist" file and put it back into the iPad backup folder, and rename it back to "ce8e8bbdb9cecd758687feae89e910a232b5f03c".
 * Go into iTunes and "Restore from Backup"

This is a rather long process and it's risky, you might lose important stuff if you didn't back up the iPad first. But it works:


 * Moon A (here showing the Castle), before colour change


 * Moon A, now with deep blue sky

iExplorer
Instead of the iTunes backup/restore method, it is also possible to get lunacraft game files in and out of your iDevice using a program called "iExplorer". I haven't done this, but I know it works with Eden World Builder, so it would probably work. If you use iExplorer, the file will just be called "0_game.dat" and you don't have to deal with those strange long filenames.