Editing game data

How data becomes a career

Think of the recognised Data root inside a football-world package as a set of instructions for building a new world. A league file says which country, competitions and clubs belong together. Each club name leads to a team file. A team file can list real or invented footballers, or let the game create a balanced squad. Optional player details can then describe nationality, age, ability, individual skills and personality.

When you choose the normal Start a new career route, select the package on Career football world and then choose its leagues on Select Database. Championship Soccer reads those files and creates the clubs, players, fixtures and calendar. Later changes to the text files do not rewrite a career that already exists; start another career when you want to see revised data.

You do not have to describe everything. A short team file can produce a fully generated squad. A player may have only a nationality, only a birth year, a few favourite skills, or a complete profile. Missing information is filled in through the same footballer-creation process used elsewhere in the game.

If you are installing an existing community world, or need the supported folder, ZIP and Package.ini layouts, begin with Custom football worlds & user content. This chapter concentrates on writing the league, team and player files themselves.

Your first football-world package

Before editing

1. Leave the installed Data folder intact. Create a separate package under Documents\My Games\Championship Soccer\DataSets. The supplied world then remains available as a working reference and fallback.
2. Use a plain-text editor. Save files as .txt, not as a word-processing document. Basic English letters and numbers are the safest choice. For accented European names, choose Western European or Windows-1252 text when your editor offers an encoding choice.
3. Begin from a similar working file. Copy the individual league or team file you want to use as an example into your package before editing it. A comparable competition provides valid shirt colours, timing and a useful layout.
4. Change one layer at a time. First make the country and clubs appear, then add named players, and finally add detailed player values.
5. Close the game before changing files. Save the complete set, then start a new career and select your package.

Files that belong to the football-world package

The examples below assume the recommended package path DataSets\My Football World\Data. A local ZIP can contain the same structure.

Files that belong to shared user Data

Generated-name pools and supported runtime replacements are global rather than private to the selected package. Put them in the fixed Documents\My Games\Championship Soccer\Data folder:

Do not place these files only inside a named DataSets package or package ZIP. See Shared user Data for fallback rules, supported files and boundaries.

Simple text rules

• Use one instruction, team name, player name or value per line.
• Keep names consistent. A club listed as Example United needs the team file Data/Team/Example United.txt.
• Put a comment on its own line and begin it in the first column with ;. Do not place comments after a value.
• Keep quotation marks around names and paths where the examples show them.
• Blank lines are harmless. An empty optional player value is treated as information you chose not to provide.
• No format number or special version header is needed.

Creating a country and its leagues

Save the following example as Data/League/Exampleland.txt inside your package. It creates one country, points to two shared name lists and adds a four-club top division.

! Country "Exampleland"
! Names "Data/Names/Exampleland_1st.txt" "Data/Names/Exampleland_2nd.txt"

: Premier Division
+ Division 1
+ promotions 0
+ relegations 0
+ reputation 10
Example United
Riverside City
Northport Athletic
Southvale Town

Name lists for generated players

Keep the historical Data/Names/... path in the league file, but create the actual Exampleland_1st.txt in shared Documents\My Games\Championship Soccer\Data\Names. Put one first name on each line:

Alex
Jamie
Morgan
Sam
Taylor

Create Exampleland_2nd.txt in that same shared folder:

Brown
Green
Hill
River
Stone

The game combines these lists when it needs another footballer. Larger lists create more variety and reduce repeated names during long careers. A name file stored only inside this package or its ZIP is not used as a private package source, so give shared files distinctive names when several custom worlds are installed.

More divisions

Start another block with a new : line, set + Division 2, promotions, relegations and reputation, then list its clubs. Make sure promotion and relegation counts agree: if two clubs leave the top division, two clubs should normally arrive from the division below.

Cup competitions

Cups use several linked lines for entry rounds, team counts and calendar weeks. For a first world, it is perfectly valid to begin with leagues only. When adding a cup, copy a working cup block from an existing country with a similar number of teams and round structure. Change the displayed cup and country names carefully, then test the complete season before altering its round sizes or weeks.

Creating teams and squads

Every club line in the league file should have a matching file in Data/Team. For Example United, create Data/Team/Example United.txt.

The smallest useful team file

! Name "Example United"
! Reputation 10
! 1 shirt Red1
! 1 shorts White
! 2 shirt White
! 2 shorts Red1

This is enough to identify the club, give it a football level and define two kits. If fewer than eleven named footballers are supplied, the game completes the squad with suitable positions and names from the country’s name lists.

Name

The club name shown in the game. Keep it the same as the league entry and filename.

Reputation

The club’s starting football standing. Team files normally use a scale from 1 for a very small side to 20 for an elite side.

Kit 1

The first-choice shirt and shorts.

Kit 2

The change kit used when the first colours would be confusing.

Team files can also describe stripes, sleeves, socks and a third kit. Use a supported colour name such as Red1, Blue2, White or Black. The standard kit colour palette below shows every included English name and its default rendered value.

Adding named players

Place roster lines after the team information and before any detailed $ blocks:

Taylor, Alex (1997): GK
Brown, Jamie (1998): D L
Stone, Morgan (1995): D C
River, Sam (2000): M C
Green, Taylor (1999): AM R
Hill, Alex (1996): F C

The recommended pattern is Family name, First name (birth year): Position Side. The name and year also make it easier to connect the roster line to a detailed player block or separate player file.

The side letters are L for left, C for centre and R for right. If you omit a side, one is chosen when the squad is created. If you omit a position, the game uses the next position the incomplete squad needs. Explicit position and side codes make the result easier to predict.

Adding player details

You can keep player details inside the team file or place them in a separate file. Both methods accept the same fields, and every field is optional.

Method 1: a detail block inside the team file

After all roster lines, begin the player’s details with $ followed by exactly the same displayed name:

$ Taylor, Alex (1997)
nationality = England
ability = 135
position = GK
dateOfBirth = 1997-06-23
handling = ++
reflexes = +++
teamwork = +
loyalty = 16

The next $ line starts another player. Keep all plain roster lines above the first detail block.

Method 2: a separate player file

Create Data/Player/Taylor, Alex (1997).txt and place only the value lines inside it:

nationality = England
ability = 135
dateOfBirth = 1997-06-23
handling = ++
reflexes = +++

General player fields

nationality is the recommended spelling. Older files using nation remain accepted. Keywords are not sensitive to capital letters, spaces, hyphens or underscores, so yearOfBirth, year of birth and year_of_birth have the same meaning. Using the recommended spellings makes a file easier for other people to read.

Skills, personality and value hints

Every skill below is optional. You may set one, several, all of them or none. The first group describes actions and movement on the pitch. The later values give footballers different styles and career behaviour even when their visible football level is similar.

Exact values from 1 to 20

Use a whole number when you want to describe the profile precisely:

speed = 18
tackling = 7
vision = 16

A value of 1 describes a very weak quality and 20 an exceptional one. Do not use numeric zero for a skill. The character 0 has a different meaning: it is the neutral hint described below.

Hints with natural variation

Use hints when you want to describe the kind of footballer without fixing every detail. Each new import chooses a value within the shown band:

You may also use a personal range such as speed = 15-18. Both ends must remain between 1 and 20, and the smaller number must come first.

Older data files may use keeping for handling, attack-mindedness for offensiveness, adaptation for adaptability, or greediness for greed. These spellings remain accepted. The letter o is also accepted as the historical form of the neutral 0 hint.

How the final footballer is created

A data file describes your intention; the game turns that description into a complete footballer who fits the career world. This is why some individual numbers can differ from the text file even when the file has been read correctly.

Ability is the overall target

ability represents the player’s intended total football level in his natural position. A goalkeeper relies on a different combination of skills from a forward, so ability is not the simple average of every number.

If you supply both ability and skills, the skills describe the shape of the player while ability sets the total level. The game preserves the relative strengths as closely as possible, then adjusts the complete set so the player actually reaches the requested ability.

What happens when information is missing

Hints are intentionally different between careers

++ means “make this a clear strength”, not “always use one fixed number”. Starting two new careers can therefore produce slightly different footballers from the same hint-based file. Exact numbers reduce this variation, although the final ability balancing described above still applies.

Ability, potential and reputation are separate

Ability describes present football quality. Potential describes the outlook for development. Reputation describes how established and recognised the player is. A young prospect can have modest ability, high potential and low reputation; an ageing star can have strong ability and reputation with little remaining development room.

Birth dates, nationality and duplicate players

Birth year or full date

Use either of these, according to how much you know:

yearOfBirth = 1997

dateOfBirth = 1997-06-23

A full date must always use four digits for the year, two for the month and two for the day. If both fields are present and disagree, the valid full date wins. The player’s age is calculated from the simulation’s start year.

How duplicate detection uses birth dates

The same normalised name and full birth date identify the same footballer across teams. If that exact identity appears again, only one copy is kept. Two players may share a name when their full dates differ. Without a full date, name matching is deliberately more cautious so that common names in different clubs are not removed by mistake.

Nationality and national-team eligibility

Use the exact displayed country name from your selected league data:

nationality = England
nationality = Brazil
nationality = Exampleland

If nationality is omitted, a club player uses the club’s country. A spelling that does not match any loaded country cannot provide valid national-team eligibility, so check spaces and country naming carefully. Nationality does not have to match the club country: an English footballer can play for a German club and still remain eligible for England.

Choosing the career start year

Create StartYear.txt directly in the recognised package data root when your world belongs to a different era. Its simplest and recommended content is one four-digit year:

2023

The file suggests the starting point for the calendar and for ages calculated from yearOfBirth or dateOfBirth. Check the value shown on Select Database: that displayed value is authoritative and may be changed before the world is created.

The file should contain a year from 1000 to 9999. The initial suggestion is resolved from a previously chosen and successfully used year, then the selected package, then the installed data, and finally 2004. A start year is not a request to rewrite historical names; it supplies the calendar reference from which stated birth dates are interpreted. The package start-year guide explains this precedence in full.

Checking your work

1. Check the names first. Confirm that every club line has a team file with the same name, and every player detail block or separate file matches its roster name.
2. Start a new, normally assembled career. Select the edited football-world package, turn off Use only fantasy players in new careers when checking named squads, and choose the edited country and division instead of using Quick Start.
3. Open the league table. Confirm the division name, club count, team names and promotion or relegation expectations.
4. Open several squads. Check that generated positions are balanced, named players appear, kits are recognisable and club strength is plausible.
5. Open player information. Check nationality, age, position, ability and the general shape of the requested skills.
6. Advance the calendar. Check fixtures, cup rounds and the first international periods before beginning a long career.
7. Save under a new filename. Keep your test career separate from an established save until the edited world behaves as intended.

Common surprises