Savegame trimmer?

[Victor1234]

Is there any savegame trimmer utility or any way to reduce the size of savegames easily (ie, not by hand in notepad)?

I only bring it up because with all the dead characters and provinces histories, it tends to cause huge amounts of lag as you progress in your game.

 

[Cheexsta]

None compatible with the most recent versions of the game, no. What I've done in the past was download EditPad Lite - it's free and has a powerful Regular Expressions search engine. Make a backup of your savegame file before you do anything!

Open your savegame file in EditPad and bring up the search dialogue (button on bottom left corner). Click the button that says "Regex" and the "Dot" button next to it, so they are both selected. In the "Search" box, type:

^\t\thistory.*?^\t\t}

And in the "Replace" box, type:

\t\thistory={}

Click the "Replace All" button and let it do its thing. This will delete all character history.

 

[Wave]

Doesn't that also delete living character history? I don't know if this can be a problem but can't it cause "time paradox" stuff like going into history with time machine and killing your dad?

 

[Cheexsta]

It deletes the history of living characters, yes, but this is unimportant unless you like reading characters' history pages. All relevant data (current titles [and when they were received], faction orientation, last ruler term, etc) are still kept.

 

[Wave]

Well yeah I thought so. I assume character flags are kept saved somewhere else than in history files so that isn't a problem either right?

 

[Cheexsta]

That's right

 

[Victor1234]

Thanks very much!

The method managed to reduce the savegame size by half. There'd be even more substantial savings if battle histories, dead characters, etc could be cut out too, but that would probably require a more complex process.

 

[Cheexsta]

Dead characters are problematic in that living characters still need to refer to them. Deleting dead characters with no relatives would be great, but I can't think of a regex string that would be able to detect them.

There should be a way to delete battle/war/mission histories, which might help as well. I'll see what I can do

 

[Cheexsta]

After a bit more testing, I might recommend against deleting any history other than character history; deleting province history will prevent cores from forming and will make the populists forget when the last war occurred. They only have a minor impact on savegame sizes anyway, so I'll edit that bit out of my previous post.

 

[Borne2Run]

This is really useful for those Magna Terra mod games, thanks!

Cut down the file from 60 to 30 mb.

 

[unmerged(26087)]

None compatible with the most recent versions of the game, no. What I've done in the past was download EditPad Lite - it's free and has a powerful Regular Expressions search engine. Make a backup of your savegame file before you do anything!

Open your savegame file in EditPad and bring up the search dialogue (button on bottom left corner). Click the button that says "Regex" and the "Dot" button next to it, so they are both selected. In the "Search" box, type:

^\t\thistory.*?^\t\t}

And in the "Replace" box, type:

\t\thistory={}

Click the "Replace All" button and let it do its thing. This will delete all character history.

I'd like to celebrate the first time that i venture past 550AVC since i own the game by trying this: will it work alright with the 2.36b patch?

 

[Cheexsta]

Great to hear it, Ural

Yes, this should work with any patch as far as I can tell. Make a backup first, though!

 

[unmerged(26087)]

Thank you, Cheexsta.

A few posts back you also mentioned the possibility to delete battle history, too. Did you by chance find out how?

I know there's a savegame trimmer that does it, but i'd rather keep my dead characters around, for the moment.