Change difficulty mid run

[Petite Fleur Sasha]

I really want to have the One True Utopia achievement, but my 800+ day colony in on easy diff. I played on all difficulties but that one is the closest to the requirements and I don't think I have another 100 hours in me to build something that grand. Can I please ask about changing the difficulty setting mid game? Or maybe for an achievement to work on easy too? Thank you

[glass zebra]

When they added that "normal and hard only" achievement, it made me feel a bit weird to play on a custom difficulty that is basically "at least as hard" as hard, but more on top. In this case I would have to play on a "lower" difficulty just for the achievement ~~. I am not sure why they added that requirement, since the default difficulties do not even have any longterm happiness or economic downsides that would matter for that goal (except milestone rerolls maybe).

I did not see any new skin the achievement offers, so it does not matter that much I guess. The difficulty setting should in theory be able to be edited in your .dat file, but unless you know your way around editing stuff like that I would not recommend it to not destroy your save. I wonder if they would add an official way, since that can very much make the difficulty requirement in there a bit pointless, since anybody could flip the game on hard for that one + the zombie skin achievement and then go back.

Edit: there does seem to be a new emblem for that achievements.

[Petite Fleur Sasha]

Yes, you are right about that year on high difficulty achievement, zebra. Oh well, I don't want to sound like a wimp, I will do this True utopia one day, it's just that one time I decided to chill and build up calmly and chose the easy difficulty and that's where I have the fattest most awesome colony, and now I feel punished for this decision with such a sudden achievement, I thought that after all these hours in this beloved game, I would easily have 100%. This thread is a moment of weakness I suppose :3

[glass zebra]

The new emblem is not usable until you make a new colony either though, so even if you could finish the achievement now, you'd still have to make at least one more city to use it. It is just a bit weird to have that achievement being linked to difficulty, since the difficulty does not do much to the requirements. The one on hard to get the zombie skins "makes more sense", since that is "survive" and the reward is also directly linked to what the hard difficulty increases: zombies.

Another thing is the "this as an early access title" I guess. Afaik they never broke saves on updates, but they at least add new cities and a whole new biome that did not show up for old saves. It is a bit hard with games like these though, since people can put in a ton of hours into a single save and then updates can hurt. At least it was not like with Oxygen Not Included, where bases could break on updates to do changes (e.g. abysallite pipes not being a 0% conductive anymore) or when people used mods: the save not working anymore with no way to go back unless you make an effort to get Steam to not update your copy and still play it ~~