Mass Effect 2: Enabling all recruit missions (by Ecael)

ATTENTION: The original post contained links to some images that are no longer available.


**SKIP IF YOU DON'T WANT LEGION FIRST**

Recruiting Legion early messes up the main Collector questline - here is how to adjust for that (multiple steps required!)


After you recruit Legion, the game forces you to take the IFF. Believe me, it does - I tried teleporting to the Reaper Core immediately and the game still assumed I picked it up. Thus, the first step:



-There are two values that you need to change: One controls the IFF 2-mission countdown, the other controls the main Stop the Collectors quest. The Stop the Collectors quest relies solely on the list itself ('Assemble the Team') and not the mission description on the right side.

A. IFF countdown - Search for a text string called "None.É" (quotes not included). Starting from the N, skip an A6 amount of blocks (166 blocks in decimal format - sorry, there's no similar starting area for other save files!). The few blocks before it should look something similar to E4 84 0E (ignore this even if different). The next block is 01 (IFF installing), switch it to 00 to disable it.

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B. Stop the Collectors mission - We're not finished yet, we still need to modify the mission log. Do a search for 7E 14 00 00 or 9A 18 00 00. That 7E 14 is actually one quest ID in reverse (the real ID is 14 7E = 5246, which I believe is the Prologue quest). The list after that is all the quest IDs currently in your mission log. The important part we want is BEFORE that, which keeps track of your quest progress in the order that you receive them:

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For my save file - and some others - the Stop the Collectors quest is listed under 0A (10th Quest) and then has a whole bunch of zeroes after it until 0B. The numbers coincide with the mission progress - as you can see, there's a 05 00 00 near the end, which tells the game to skip from Assembling the Team to the IFF installation. Copy and paste this string, overwriting 0A up until before 0B and changing the file size:
0A 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 --(before 0B)

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SAVE THE FILE, AND THEN OPEN/SAVE IN GIBBED'S SAVE EDITOR TO RENEW THE FILE CHECKSUM (The game will detect it as corrupt otherwise)

This changes it back to "Assemble Your Team" and Kelly won't start jabbering about missions you haven't done yet. You can now play until you want to enable Horizon yourself.

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*Do this once you're ready to have the Normandy crew abducted, which is any time after you've completed the Disabled Collector Vessel mission, preferably.*

-NOTE: I believe this requires you to do at least 2 missions before you can trigger it, but I'm not sure. Two parts, involving the same places from the last hex edit:

A. IFF countdown - None.É area, starting from N, skip A6 amount of blocks (166 blocks in decimal format). The next block will probably say '40', switch it back to 01 to install it.

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B. Stop the Collectors mission - By now, your mission IDs and progress list in the file should be ridiculously filled with zeroes (look where the 7E 14 is at the bottom in comparison now). Do a search for 0A 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 to make life easier.

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The 05 that comes after that (and the 04 at the end before 0B) is essentially saying "Go get the Reaper IFF" even after you already completed it. Time to change that. Copy and paste this string over 0A and before 0B:
0A 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 06 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 03 00 00 00 04 00 00 00 05 00 00 00

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SAVE THE FILE, AND THEN OPEN/SAVE IN GIBBED'S SAVE EDITOR TO RENEW THE FILE CHECKSUM (The game will detect it as corrupt otherwise)

That should trigger the Reaper IFF installation almost immediately (or with 2 missions done). You can now go through the Omega-4 relay after this and finish the game normally.