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Various programming stuff

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Serafeim

Saving in Dark Souls

Introduction

The Dark Souls Trilogy (1-2-3) from FromSoftware is one of the modern gaming classics. The games should be experienced by everybody because of their excellent gameplay, combat mechanics, atmosphere and character development. The defining characteristic of the Dark Souls Trilogy and what scares most gamers is their over the top difficulty.

This great difficulty is increased even more because of the saving mechanism of these games: There’s a single save game in the game, if you die you’ll return to a previous checkpoint (called bonfire). These checkpoint are sparcely located within the gaming world and they are not always near boss fights, so if you die in a boss fight you may need to kill enemies for sometime before you reach the boss again to retry. Also, everything is permanent so if you screw up somehow (i.e you kill an important NPC) there’s no way to “restore” your game; you’ll lose him (and his items if he’s a merchant) for the rest of your current game!

If the above seems too difficult for you to even try, fear not! There a particular way to have “real” saves in all three Dark Souls games, even if it is a little cumbersome. It will be much less cumbersome than having to restart the game because you killed an important NPC.

Disclaimer

Before describing the technique I’d like to provide some disclaimer points:

  • The Dark Souls Trilogy should be experienced as-is. You shouldn’t use this method because you’ll make the games easier and not as difficult as it was intented by their publisher. Use it only as a last resort when you are going to abandon the game.
  • Most other Dark Souls players will mock you and hate you for using these techniques.
  • You may break your save if you do something wrong so I won’t be held responsible for losing your progress.

How Dark Souls saves your game

All three Dark Souls games have a particular directory in your hard disk where they place their save game. There’s a single file with your save game that has an extension endingg in .sl2.

From my PC, the folders and names of each of these games are the following:

  • Dark Souls Remastered: Folder C:\Users\username\Documents\NBGI\DARK SOULS REMASTERED\1638, filename: DRAKS0005.sl2
  • Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\DarkSoulsII\0110000100000666\, filename: DS2SOFS0000.sl2
  • Dark Souls 3: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\DarkSoulsIII\0110000100000666\, filename: DS3000.sl2

Notice that the username will be your user’s username while the numbers you see will probably be different.

Now, when some particular action occurs (i.e when you kill an enemy) the game will overwrite the file in the folder with a new one with the changes. You will see a flame in the top right of your screen when this happens. Notice that this happens on particular moments, for example if you are just moving without encountering enemies your game won’t be saved (so if for example you make a difficult jump the game won’t be saved right after the jump). Also, Dark Souls will save your game when you quit (so if you do a difficult jump, quit the game and restart you will be after the jump).

The above description enables you to actually have proper saves: Quit the game (not completely, just display the title screen), backup the save file in a different location, start the game. If you die, quit the game (again just display the title screen), copy over from the backup to the save location and start the game again. Notice that you should always quit the game before restoring from a save file because Dark Souls reads the saves only then. If you copy over a backup save while playing the game the backup will be just overwritten with the new save data.

However you can backup your game without actually quitting: When you’ve reach a point you feel it needs saving, just alt+tab outside of your game copy over the save to a backup location (you can even give it a proper name) and continue playing. When you want to load that save you’ll need to quit, restore the backup and start the game again. Notice that when you do this the game will show you a warning that you “did not properly quit the game”. From what I can understand, when you quit the game Dark Souls writes some flag to your save game. If you shut down your PC while playing (or copy over the save game) then Dark Souls won’t write that flag to your save game. However from my experience in all three Dark Souls games this warning doesn’t mean anything, the game will continue normally without any problems.

Making it simpler

Copying over the save game in a different location is cumbersome and makes it easy to do mistakes (i.e copy instead of restoring your backup save, copy over the current save to your backup). To make this process easier I will give you here a simple autohotkey script that will do this for you using F7 to backup your save and F8 to restore it (don’t forget that you can only restore when you have quit the game and see the title screen).

To use this script you need the excellent autohotkey utility. Download and install it and then execute the script by double clicking it (it needs to have an .ahk extension):

#SingleInstance Force
#MaxHotkeysPerInterval 99999
SendMode Input  ; Recommended for new scripts due to its superior speed and reliability.
SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir%  ; Ensures a consistent starting directory.


SAVE_FOLDER_DS := "C:\Users\serafeim\AppData\Roaming\DarkSoulsII\0110000100000666\"
SAVE_FILENAME_DS := "DS2SOFS0000.sl2"
BACKUP_FOLDER_DS := "C:\Users\serafeim\Documents\ds2\"


GetFolderMax(f)
{
  MAX := 0
  Loop, Files, %f%\*.*
  {
    NUM_EXT := 1 * A_LoopFileExt

    if (NUM_EXT> MAX)
    {
      MAX := NUM_EXT
    }
  }

  return MAX
}

F7::
{
  ;MsgBox % "F7"
  ;MsgBox % "Will copy " . SAVE_FILENAME_DS . " to " . BACKUP_FOLDER_DS

  MAX_P1 := GetFolderMax(BACKUP_FOLDER_DS) + 1
  ;MsgBox % "Max + 1 is " . MAX_P1

  SOURCE := SAVE_FOLDER_DS . SAVE_FILENAME_DS
  DEST := BACKUP_FOLDER_DS . SAVE_FILENAME_DS . "." . MAX_P1

  ;MsgBox % "Will copy " . SOURCE . " to " . DEST
  FileCopy, %SOURCE%, %DEST%
  return
}

F8::
{
  ;MsgBox % "F8"
  MAX := GetFolderMax(BACKUP_FOLDER_DS)
  MAX_FILE := BACKUP_FOLDER_DS . SAVE_FILENAME_DS . "." . MAX
  ;MsgBox % "Maxfile is " . MAX_FILE

  SOURCE := MAX_FILE
  DEST := SAVE_FOLDER_DS . SAVE_FILENAME_DS

  ;MsgBox % "Will copy " . SOURCE . " to " . DEST
  FileCopy, %SOURCE%, %DEST%, 1
  return
}

The script is very easy to understand but I’ll explain it a bit here: First of all you need to define the SAVE_FOLDER_DS, SAVE_FILENAME_DS and BACKUP_FOLDER_DS variables. The first two are the folder and filename of your game (in my example I’m using it for DS2). The BACKUP_FOLDER_DS is where you want your backups to be placed. This script will backup your save file in that folder when you press F7. To keep better backups it will append an increasing number in the end of your filename so when you press F7 you will see that it will create a file named DS2SOFS0000.sl2.0, then DS2SOFS0000.sl2.1 etc in the BACKUP_FOLDER_DS. When you press F8 it will get the file with the biggest number in the end, strip that number and copy it over your Dark Souls save file.

As you can see there’s a GetFolderMax function that retrieves the max number from your backup folder. Then, F7 and F8 will use that function to either copy over your Dark Souls save file in the backup with an increased number or retrieve the latest one and restore it in your save folder.

The script works independently of the game so if you configure it and press F7 you should see that the backup file will be created. Also if you delete (or rename) your Dark Souls save file and press F8 you should see that it will be restore by the backup.

So using the above script, my play workflow is like this: Start Dark Souls, kill an enemy, press F7, kill another enemy, press F7 (depending on how difficult the enemies are of course). Die from an enemy, quit the game, press F8, continue my game.

One thing to notice is that in Windows 10 it seems that the hotkeys are not captured from autohotkey when the game runs in full screen. When I run the games in a window it works fine. Some people say that if you run autohotkey as administrator it will capture the key-presses but it didn’t work fine for me.

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