zenobi-us Cyberwise: saves and appearance
Verified: Cyberpunk 2077 patch 2.31 - August 2026 Re-check after a patch: HIGHEST drift risk in the family. The save container is an internal format with no compatibility promise - re-verify the chunk layout and the appearance section before trusting any offset.
Load cyberwise alongside this for the method rules.
Check the patch version first - this topic drifts fastest of any in the family.
(Get-Item "$GameRoot\bin\x64\Cyberpunk2077.exe").VersionInfo.ProductVersion
If that is not the version in the stamp above, say so before quoting an offset.
Expand-Save.ps1 also prints the save's own saveVersion and gameVersion from
the header, which is the more precise check - a save written by an older patch
keeps that patch's layout regardless of what is installed now.
A save is personal data
Read the minimum needed to answer the question. Do not write decoded saves, appearance dumps or preset decodes anywhere shareable, and never into a repo.
What is in here
references/saves-and-appearance.md is the order of work: read the metadata
first, use the tools rather than hand-decoding, and treat everything you find as
personal data.
The formats themselves are in the base wiki (cyberwise-wiki), because a
byte layout is knowledge rather than instruction:
| article | covers |
|---|---|
/formats/cyberpunk-save-container |
CSAV/CLZF header, the chunk table, LZ4 blocks, the node table read backwards from ENOD, the packed-VLQ node count, and the offset trap |
/formats/appearance-in-a-save |
the appearance node, its 0x80|len string grammar, the blocks that disagree, face morph IDs |
/formats/acu-preset |
the LocKey#<hash>:<index> line format and how the hash map is recovered |
Two things worth knowing before you start:
CharacetrCustomization_Appearancesis spelled that way in the game. It is CDPR's own typo, not one to correct while searching.- An ACU
LocKey#<n>is not a localization key. It is a hash of the customization group name, which is why looking it up as a LocKey finds nothing.
Tools
Do not decode a save by hand. Both of these already work, and hand-walking the chunk table is where the offset trap bites.
| tool | what it does |
|---|---|
tools/Expand-Save.ps1 |
decompresses a sav.dat into one flat blob, ready to search |
tools/Decode-Preset.ps1 |
turns ACU .preset files into readable appearance fields |
.\tools\Expand-Save.ps1 -SavePath "<save>\sav.dat" -OutPath "$env:TEMP\save.bin"
.\tools\Decode-Preset.ps1 -Directory "<acu presets dir>" -Compare
Expand-Save.ps1 carries a hand-rolled LZ4 block decoder - .NET has none, and
the chunks are blocks rather than frames, so a general LZ4 library will refuse
them. It prints saveVersion and gameVersion from the header; if those differ
from the Verified stamp above, re-check the layout before trusting offsets.
Decode-Preset.ps1 needs preset-groups.csv beside it, which maps the FNV1a-64
group-name hashes to names. Unknown hashes print as ?<hash> rather than being
dropped, so a preset is never silently reported as smaller than it is - if you
see those, the map needs extending, the preset is not corrupt.
Write output to a temp path, never into a repo - see above.
Reference material
| file | covers |
|---|---|
references/saves-and-appearance.md |
the order of work, and pointers to the format articles |
The layouts live in the base wiki at /formats/cyberpunk-save-container,
/formats/appearance-in-a-save and /formats/acu-preset. Read those before
writing any parser.