Greetings, medievalists! Let’s talk about saves.
In short, we will introduce a new save system in the game. This change won't affect your existing saves, but you'll need to undergo a simple and harmless save migration process to play the upcoming version of Going Medieval. Here's why:
We recognize the significance of your settlements. You've devoted countless hours to crafting your masterpieces, each tested by every new feature we introduce. There is a certain magic and thrill in such undertakings. Will the current arrangement work with the new way flora functions? Is there enough heat with the temperature overhaul? Are my defenses good enough for the wild animals? Improvise, adapt, overcome.
Seeing how you discuss potential tactics and solutions with other players is something we really appreciate and gives us great insight into all the possible playstyles.
Ever since Going Medieval entered Early Access, we strove to keep the game compatible with all the updates we released. Long-time players know that this was only not possible once during the game’s development, back when we did a huge code restructuring. Thankfully, that occurred early on, and ever since, each new update has supported the previous version. Even when we introduced systems that couldn’t magically appear in your existing saves (like water), we tried to give you instructions on how to integrate them with dev tools.
One of the things we’ve been working on in the backend for the last couple of months is save refactoring.
The old (current) save system is at best - functional but clunky. It was pretty basic, but as Going Medieval continues to evolve and your creative ambitions expand, it becomes obvious that we need something advanced and stable.
The new save system will do just that. It will improve saving and loading speed, enable the existence of multiple settlements on the same game map which will allow for visiting/raiding other computer-generated settlements (note: this feature is not coming in the next update), provide better debugging on our side which will hopefully give us more information on some pesky issues, and best of all - thanks to it, we will never have to do a save reset again. The newest update (0.18.x) will come with the new save refactor system.
It is very important to us that you maintain and cultivate the progress of your settlement, and that’s why we developed this process.
In the upcoming days, on the experimental branch, we will introduce you to this migration process and provide a step-by-step guide on how to migrate your old saves to the new version and be compatible with the upcoming updates.
It will involve another branch (like experimental) and a few pretty simple steps.
We tested this internally and everything seems to be working, but the player's perspective is also important here, and that’s why we’ll first try it on the experimental version before we push it on the main branch too.
Rest assured that what we are doing here is for the benefit of everyone and should not have any negative impact. We will let you know when the build is live and provide you with easy step-by-step instructions that you can follow.
Have patience and talk to you soon.