Dick removed all species from my Ironman save file. Any way to recover?

[elliotbay]

I started up my 65-hour Ironman Stellaris game on Sunday to find rampant unemployment and economic deficit. A lot of the updates seem cool, but not a good fit for trying to continue a game that's almost complete. So I followed the instructions to revert to Butler. Mostly back to normal, but with a couple oddities. I could swear the icon for amenities is different than I've been playing with, but whatever. I'm seeing a lot more non-green planet icons on my galaxy map, which is weird because I have a pretty multi-species empire at this point. When I check my species list, the reason is clear: I have no species in my empire whatsoever. It's like that no matter which version of the game I load it in. If I look at population details for my colonies, they're all blobs with no species name. Is there any way I can recover from this apart from having kept a backup save (which I didn't)?

On a related note, the first time you load Dick, when you go to start a new game, there's a warning that your old save files are not guaranteed to be compatible. If you start the game with "Resume" from the launcher (the faster way), there is no such warning. It seems like if the save files aren't going to be compatible, maybe you should let us know when loading the save file? Or at the very least before overwriting the save file.

 

[elliotbay]

Actually, they're not blobs. I was just looking at the habitat background image. There's no species portrait. On my capital planet, they all have 15% habitability, which must be why this save is losing 2k energy credits per month.

 

[AndrewT]

the first time you load Dick, when you go to start a new game, there's a warning that your old save files are not guaranteed to be compatible. If you start the game with "Resume" from the launcher (the faster way), there is no such warning. It seems like if the save files aren't going to be compatible, maybe you should let us know when loading the save file? Or at the very least before overwriting the save file.

We completely agree, this was a definite oversight in this case. I've raised this exact issue with the devs and it should not ever happen again.

Unfortunately that does not help you here, because loading a 2.8.x save under 3.0 updates it permanently - any negative effects are embedded in the save file now. Sorry about that! I don't suppose you happen to have kept a save from 2.8.x , from before 3.0 came out?

 

[elliotbay]

Short answer: I do not. The machine is largely a gaming PC, so I don't have automatic backups set up on it, and I didn't feel the need to cheat the Iron Man restriction so I didn't set anything up special for this case.

I don't suppose there's a save file decoder/encoder I can use? I'm willing to manually set some things just so I can see what the end of the game looks like.

 

[AndrewT]

Not so far as I know, but you might ask over in the User Mods forum, they would have faced such issues before I am sure.

 

[elliotbay]

Well, just in case somebody else stumbles upon this thread and is inclined to try to hack at it with a hex editor, I spent some time getting numbers from the game and searching for them in the save file. I found a few candidates for where resources amounts were stored, but when I tried to edit one of them, it just resulted in a blank game upon loading. I found no candidates for where unity was stored (since mine is higher than fits in 2 bytes), so maybe none of those spots was really correct and there's some compression I have to undo. Either that or there's a checksum somewhere. Regardless, I think I'll give up on this. Maybe I'll pick the game back up in a month or so with a different loadout :\