How to Edit Relationships in TEW IX (Total Extreme Wrestling)
Total Extreme Wrestling IX gives you granular control over nearly every aspect of your wrestling universe — including the web of relationships between workers, promotions, and bookers. Editing these relationships correctly can be the difference between a smoothly running promotion and a locker room full of problems you didn't intentionally create. Here's exactly how it works.
What "Relationships" Actually Means in TEW IX
In TEW IX, relationships refer to the standing between two entities in the game — typically between workers (wrestlers, managers, road agents) or between a worker and a promotion. These relationships influence:
- Morale and locker room dynamics
- Booking decisions (who will and won't work with whom)
- Contract negotiations
- Creative chemistry in matches and angles
Relationships fall into a few broad types: personal relationships (friends, enemies, romantic), professional relationships (mentor/student, rivals), and promotion loyalty. Each type carries different gameplay weight.
Where to Find the Relationship Editor 🎮
TEW IX separates relationship editing depending on whether you're in the game's database editor (before or outside of a save) or inside an active game world.
Editing Relationships in the Database Editor
The Database Editor is the most direct path to changing base relationships. To access it:
- From the main menu, select Database Editor
- Navigate to Workers
- Select the worker whose relationship you want to modify
- Open the Relationships tab within their profile
From here, you can add, remove, or modify relationship entries. Each entry requires:
- The target (who the relationship is with)
- The relationship type (friend, enemy, lover, mentor, etc.)
- The level or intensity, where applicable
Changes made here affect the base database, meaning they apply to new games started after saving — not to active saves already in progress.
Editing Relationships During an Active Game
Once you're inside a running game, direct relationship editing works differently. TEW IX uses an in-game editor accessible through:
- The Game Options or Tools menu (depending on your version/patch)
- Selecting In-Game Editor
- Navigating to the worker or entity you want to modify
The in-game editor mirrors much of the database editor's functionality but applies changes immediately to your current save. This is the method most players use mid-career when they want to fix a relationship that's causing booking headaches or when they're roleplaying a kayfabe storyline change.
The Key Variables That Affect How Relationships Work
Understanding that you can edit a relationship is only part of the picture. How that relationship actually plays out in your game depends on several factors:
Worker personality traits — A worker with a "locker room cancer" trait will have a harder floor on relationships regardless of what you manually set. Positive edits may be partially offset.
Relationship type and intensity — A bitter enemy relationship has stronger mechanical effects than a general dislike. When editing, choosing the correct type matters more than just flipping a positive/negative switch.
Promotion size and structure — In a large promotion with deep rosters, one edited relationship creates smaller ripple effects. In a small regional promotion, the same change can reshape your entire booking dynamic.
Momentum and history — TEW IX tracks relationship history dynamically. Even after you manually adjust a relationship, in-game events (matches, promos, backstage incidents) will continue pushing that relationship in new directions unless you intervene again.
Common Relationship Edits and What They Do
| Relationship Edit | Primary Effect | Secondary Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Setting two workers as Friends | Improved morale when working together | More willing to job to each other |
| Setting workers as Enemies | Refusal to work together; potential incidents | Negative locker room spread if both are prominent |
| Assigning a Mentor/Student bond | Faster skill development for student | Mentor's departure can cause morale hit |
| Adjusting Promotion Loyalty | Worker more or less likely to sign/re-sign | Affects negotiating leverage and pay demands |
Different Player Setups, Different Outcomes
How much relationship editing you actually need depends heavily on your play style and save setup.
Sandbox and historical mod players often do extensive database editing before starting a save — adjusting relationships to match real-world dynamics or a specific fictional universe. For these players, the pre-game database editor is where most of the work happens.
Career mode and challenge players tend to use the in-game editor sparingly, treating it as a correction tool rather than a routine action. They'll intervene when a relationship is blocking something narratively important, but otherwise let the simulation run.
Booker sim purists sometimes avoid the editor entirely, accepting emergent relationship drama as part of the challenge. In this context, understanding relationships matters more for reacting to them than changing them.
The difficulty settings you've chosen also matter — on higher difficulty levels, the game's AI pushes back harder against relationships that seem artificially set, meaning manually edited dynamics may erode faster than they would on a more permissive setting. 🔧
What Doesn't Get Edited Here
It's worth knowing that some things look like relationships but are managed elsewhere. Worker push levels, creative roles, and championship histories are separate systems. A worker's trust rating with your promotion is a product of time and match history — it can't be directly set in the relationship editor, though it's influenced by the relationships around it.
Similarly, tag team and stable chemistry is tracked separately from personal relationships. Two workers can have a strong personal friendship and still have poor on-screen chemistry if their styles or attributes don't mesh — those are edited through the team/stable management screens.
The more complex your roster and the longer your save has been running, the more likely it is that a single relationship edit sits inside a larger web of interconnected dynamics — which is what makes TEW IX genuinely deep, and what makes the "right" edit entirely dependent on where your particular save currently stands.