How Saving Works

[bladesoframen]

luckyegg and I have been discussing this game a lot, so I wanted to document a fairly important part of our discussion. (Note: Pretty much every cool discovery here is credit to luckyegg. I just want to document it)

 

Key:

Run - An instance of a playthrough through the game

 

In the game, your save data is composed of a few things:

Game progress (epilogues obtained, medals obtained, campaigns finished, classes unlocked, perks bought, and castle followers)

Genesis stones collected

Dream stones collected

Run completion

Dream vault storage

Run saves.

 

Normal run:

To see how this all works out, here is the normal flow of the game. You start a run. During your run, you make a run save. You finish your run. When you finish the run, the game does a few things, it marks your run as completed, saves your game progress, and adds the number of genesis stones collected and dream stones you collected to their total. Then you're shown the initial vault screen and given the option to further game progress (perks, classes, buyable epilogues, and dream vault size) and being able to add items to the dream vault. And then you leave, and the run is done.

 

You'll repeat this process many times as this is the normal flow of the game, but let's see what happens when some other variables are put into play

 

Loading the game before finishing the run:

Load the game. You finish your run. Run gets marked as completed and you get everything you expect from a normal run of the game. No surprises here.

 

Loading the game after finishing the run:

Load the game. You finish your run. However, since the run is marked as completed, you can't get dream stones, genesis stones, or use the dream vault. The only thing that can be affected is game progress, so checking if you finished new epilogues, or got new medals.

 

(Note: If you finish a run, but quite the game before the final ratings show up, the game will not save the game data yet, so you can load that with no worries)

 

This is a very essential thing to note when trying to get done 2-3 Endings in 1 playthrough, or doing longer runs. If your game ends in death, and you load your save normally, you can't get any of the dream or Genesis stones from your second run. However, you can get new endings by continuing the game. 

 

Backing up the full game save finishing the run, loading the run, and then finishing again:

So instead of just doing a normal save, you back up your entire game save data onto USB or Plus. Then you load the game and finish the run. Doing so you reach, the flow stated by "Loading the game before finishing the run" as expected. Now, let's say that your run ended because of death and not because you go the ending you wanted. Instead of loading the game normally, you load the game from your backup instead, and then do a load. Plus saves, the entire save data, including run completion, so all of your game completion and dream and genesis stone gains from the previous run will be reverted and instead given to you at the end of this run. In this way, you can make sure you can keep all of your rare drops and get the full amount of genesis and dream stones.

 

Just remember to not use this after you got 1 ending and want to get a second ending. Reverting your game completion is a terrible idea in that case.

 

Dream Vault and Saves:

 

(Highly recommended to do a game save backup before messing with this stuff)

 

Because of how dream vault data and normal run data are independent, there are some peculiarities on how they interact.

Edited April 16, 2017 by bladesoframen