I don’t understand what you’re describing. What mod menu? Are you editing the game files directly or creating a new mod? By changing the name of the char, did you rename the file in the archive or extracted folder? Avoid renaming files for now as that’s likely to break stuff.
Did you extract the stonehearth.smod into the same /mod directory? You don’t want to have both the extracted archive and the compressed archive in the /mod folder; the game will want to load both and it’s a coin toss which one wins for changes.
At the moment, modding isn’t too well documented to just pick up and go. There’s a fair amount of reading necessary so you should ask yourself if this is something you really want to do or perhaps wait and enjoy the game. If you are serious about modding, please spend some time looking over mods created by the community as they well give you a really good idea what is possible and how it was done.
Here’s a link to a mod list: Stonehearth Mod List - Find a couple mods close to what you’re looking to do and see how that person did it.