Your best bet is to use something like ss1edit to decompress the save file, then edit it (I use dhex here, but of course any hex editor will do): $ bin/res -decompress -in-place -res SAVGAM00.DAT Unfortunately, chunk 4001 is stored compressed, so you can't just open SAVGAMXX.DAT in a hex editor and change the settings. In the save file, they are stored at offsets 0x15-0x18 of chunk 4001. There's no in-game way to change the difficulty settings.