Any tips and tricks?
I’ve lost a number of characters to shitty bugs, or features which haven’t been properly implemented yet (ahem, temperature, ahem), and it’s kinda killing my desire to play. I’m awful at creating backups of my save folders, too, so I’m wondering if anyone knows of a good way to bring a character up to the same skills it had before it died.
Unfortunately you can only add so many points at character creation, through the options menu, so that’s not much help.
“you can only add so many points”
You know the game’s open source right
You are speaking to the computer-illiterate. I wouldn’t know how to edit the game’s code, let alone recompile it 
maybe some kind soul will take it upon themselves to have the exception handler attempt to write a save file to an alternate path … i say that after just having lost another 2 hours cause i foolishly went into the cellar.
It’s not a perfect solution but if you really want your skills back you can open the
Wherever-you-put-your-game-folder\Cataclysm-DDA\data folder
From there right click on the options text document and select edit.
Near the end it’ll say Initial_points 6 (or whatever you have it set to) just change this number to set your new starting limit. This can go as high as you want.
This all said it’s not a good idea to use this method as it may cheapen you play experience.
On Windows, copying the save file works fine so long as you do it before actually getting the Game Over message; I keep mine in a subfolder set. (PM me if you want more specific information.)
If you’re willing to invest a bit of time you can use Debug mode to restore your items and mutations, which can be tedious given the interface ( unless I missed something). Skills, on the other hand, cannot be increased individually in Debug mode, so CharGen might be your only option.
Buuut, as they say, prevention is better than cure. Savescumming is the most obvious prevention technique, if not the only one, as far as I know. It’s what I do whenever game breaking bugs occur. Granted, I lose a bit of progress in the process since I don’t save a copy frequently, but it’s better than losing the whole character to bugs. I’m not sure if just making a copy of the save file itself is enough, so I copy the whole folder (the one labeled “save”).
Yeah, that’s an important distinction. I copy the whole folder too.
Losing two days of progress beats hell out of losing a few weeks’ worth of progress.
[quote=“TaintedHolyWater, post:5, topic:603”]It’s not a perfect solution but if you really want your skills back you can open the
Wherever-you-put-your-game-folder\Cataclysm-DDA\data folder
From there right click on the options text document and select edit.
Near the end it’ll say Initial_points 6 (or whatever you have it set to) just change this number to set your new starting limit. This can go as high as you want.
This all said it’s not a good idea to use this method as it may cheapen you play experience.[/quote]
That pretty much is perfect. It would only cheapen the play experience if I’d lost my character due to genuine neglect (for example I once died from attacking an NPC, which was buggy as shit, but I did “cause” it, so I didn’t scum the character back to life).
I’ll try and keep backups, but that’s more effort and more work than this method (since you’ll sometimes need to catch up a couple of days, rather than a few 100 xp worth of half-full skills).
I’ve put these and some more tips into the wiki’s cheating page for now. Except the ‘put whatever points you want into options.txt’ thing, that is kinda freaking me out still… maybe some of you guys could proof what i wrote and tighten it up a bit.
but while i have your attention, please let me repeat the suggestion that the game write a complete save when it runs into an unrecoverable exception. a save like this may _not be playable until the bug its documenting has been fixed, but it would document the rare and crazy bugs that slip by the eyes of the team.
i can understand the team not wanting to see the that sort of thing, while they are pondering replacing entire subsystems with new/better and yet to be debugged code, but from the player end, puhlease. [size=8pt](also save-file compatibility for future versions)[/size]