Missing Number, better known as “MissingNo,” was a sort of glitch character originally discovered in the first Pokemon games. Since that discovery, MissingNo has become something of an unofficial mascot for deliberately glitching and futzing with video game files, with some game devs even deliberately adding their own spin on it to uncover. Vampire Survivors is one such game with its own playable MissingNo. Here’s how to unlock MissingNo in Vampire Survivors.
In earlier versions of Vampire Survivors, you could unlock MissingNo simply by killing Death when he comes to get you at the end of a run. In a recent update, though, this was changed; killing Death unlocks the character Mask of Red Death instead. So how are you supposed to get MissingNo now? Well, fittingly for a glitched character, you gotta mess with the game’s files.
How to Unlock MissingNo in Vampire Survivors
In your Steam library, right-click on Vampire Survivors, go to Manage, and click browse local files. Go into the resources folder, followed by app, .webpack, and renderer, in that order. This will lead you to the game’s save file, titled SaveDataBackup.sav, which you’ll need to mess with using a text editor like Notepad++. Make sure to make a backup of that save file before making any edits; this is an involved process, and getting it wrong can result in save corruption.
Open up SaveDataBackup.sav in the text editor and use the find function (ctrl + F) to find the phrase BoughtCharacters. You’ll see a list of the game’s characters, all in all caps and between quotations. At the end of that list, add the phrase “FINO” with quotes and all caps, just like that. After that, find the phrase UnlockedCharacters to get another character list. Add “FINO” to the end of that list as well.
Next, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the document. You should see the phrase “checksum”:, followed by a bunch of assorted hexidecimal codes. Delete all of the hexidecimals, but leave the quotes they were between, so it looks like “checksum”:”” .
Now you need to hash the document. Use ctrl + A to select all of the text in the document and ctrl + C to copy it. Go to this website to find an easy hash utility, and paste the document contents into the input field. Copy all of the stuff that shows up in the output field and paste it into the save document where the hexidecimal code previously was. It should be “checksum”: followed by the code in between the quotes. You’re all done editing, so save the file and close it.
Boot up Vampire Survivors, go to the options menu, and click Restore Backup. The game will restart, and if you did everything right, MissingNo should appear in the character select menu.
