Using Legends Mode on an Active fortress (Solution)

[DuxAter]

So, it's not often that I post my insight into games and whatnot- but this is an issue I struggled with, and couldn't find a simple solution for. So because this is such an awesome community, I figured I'd throw my penny into the pile, and hope that maybe someday it helps out a new player! (Scroll to the bottom for just the tips).


**So, Legends mode.**

It's a really cool mode, and addition to the game. You can use it to discover the history of your world, and eventually uncover secrets and sometimes epic stories if you look hard enough. (Like for example, you'd enter the name of your civilisation, or your favourite dwarf into the text box, and then try to find the story in the layers of text phrased like in game notifications). It can be a fun tool to help expand on your knowledge of your own world. My favourite is using it to look up the history of a dead civilisation, and see how they fell.


**But Legends mode is hard to start using.**

Not only because of how abstract it can be, but also due to the fact that under normal circumstances, you can't access the mode for a world you're already playing an active fortress in (Which makes it hard to use if you want to learn something about your world's history in game).


**But there are some solutions.**

Firstly, whenever you want to take a peak at the annals of your world's history, you could choose to retire your active fort, then parse legends, then "unretire" it again in the embark screen after you close legends mode. But I would say... DO NOT DO THIS.
It's obviously a pain in the butt to do all that, but the real problem is that retiring and reclaiming a fort can sometimes cause DF to bug out big time (The game resetting the parameters of underground lava or aquifers so your fort might flood when it was structurally sound before, or for some reason throwing all your items all over the map if they were in containers are prime examples of issues with reclaiming). So there is a better way.

Secondly, (And what I wanted to talk about) you can take advantage of the "Multiple timelines" feature. Basically, when you abandon or retire a fort, you get the choice to "Save to this timeline" or "Save to another timeline" (Among other options). You can then have two active copies of your world. And easily hop out of your game, and check legends in the other world to learn something, then hop right back in. It's especially worth it if you have a really cool world you spent a long time generating, and want to be able to read it's history whenever you want!!
But the problem is, there seems to be some bug right now where "new timelines" are overwriting eachother when trying to save them normally. Also, you start to get an ugly looking save menu if you do this for multiple worlds.


**So here's how you can keep an open save for legends and have it work out:**

First, it can be helpful to make sure to clear out your saves folder so that you don't accidentally mess up a save, or get them confused. You can do this by simply going into the game directory for dwarf fortress (Probably in Steam/Steamapps/Common/Dwarf Fortress), then open the "Saves" folder. You can Literally just grab all the files in there, and Copy them into a new folder on your desktop, and slap them back in afterwards (This is also how you backup a save to keep it from corrupting).
So whether or not you decided to back up your saves, I recommend clearing/deleting all the contents of your save folder (But not the folder itself) before trying this, as it just makes it easier to manage.

So now that your files are all neat and tidy, here we go:
-Create a world you like (It can take a while to get something really special).
-Now, make a dummy fort that you're just using for the timeline split.
-Now start up the fort, Make one manual save after embark, then immediately after, abandon the fortress.
-When you're in the abandonment screen, choose "Save to new timeline".
-Name the save "Legends"
-Now close the game, go back into your save file, and re-name the new region folder it just created. This will keep it organised and preserve it from the save overwriting bug. (I like to name each save folder "The name of the world" Followed by the first letter for either "Legends or Active").
-Open up DF.
-In your save menu, you should now have one active game, and a world save called: "Legends" Folder:"Worldname, L"
-Now, start up the save for your current dud fort again, and repeat the process of abandoning and saving to a new timeline and renaming the file; but rather than naming the save "Legends" call it "Active" and put an A instead of an L at the end when renaming the new folder it creates.

After all this, you'll have 3 saves in your files. The current game in the world (Which you can promptly delete), and 2 permanent versions of the world. Now, the one called legends is for browsing legends mode, and the one called active is the world you can play your games in henceforth.


**And there we go!**

Now you can check legends mode for a world you're already playing in, and (to my knowledge) the saves are safe from the current overwriting bug causing issues with using timelines in general. You can also repeat this as many times as you want, so long as the worlds have different names.

If this helps out even one person, I'll be happy.
Happy gaming guys! Strike the earth! And remember, losing is fun.

[Quizzy]

Df hack let's you view legends mode alot easier then doing that
it stilll needs testing and more work however so they recommend quitting the game right after viewing legends mode so you don't corrupt your save. But the functional is there

[DuxAter]

Oh! That's cool.

I just wanted to post what I've discovered for people who just be trying to dip their toes in, or who might not want to use big mods.

[76561188078797539]

You can save to another timeline (save and keep playing) at any time, without impacting your active save (so you do NOT retire the active gameplay fortress) Edit: Apparently this is bugged. The more you know :).

Instead, load the newly created second timeline, retire from that, and presumably keep that timeline around as a reference copy. Once you retire that fortress instance, it'll always allow you to launch Legends mode on loading it.

Also, you can have two separate instances of Dwarf Fortress running at any time with no performance impact (multicore CPUs are handy), just go to Steam\steamapps\common\Dwarf Fortress and click on Dwarf Fortress.exe instead of launching it through Steam.

So you can have your fortress running (though probably might want to pause, or set up relevant alerts to cause a pause) while you check Legends in another process window.

[MadDawg2552]

Originally posted by Sheepify:

You can save to another timeline (save and keep playing) at any time, without impacting your active save (so you do NOT retire the active gameplay fortress).

Except that feature is currently bugged and doesn't actually create a second save file, but instead saves over your current file.

[76561188078797539]

Originally posted by MadDawg2552:

Except that feature is currently bugged and doesn't actually create a second save file, but instead saves over your current file.

Huh, I'm using it for checkpoint saves and never noticed.

Thanks for the heads-up, will have to check what exactly is going on, I did use that method to make a Legends save for my ongoing playthrough. Not sure why I don't remember it screwing up the active save.

[DuxAter]

Originally posted by Sheepify:

Originally posted by MadDawg2552:

Except that feature is currently bugged and doesn't actually create a second save file, but instead saves over your current file.

Huh, I'm using it for checkpoint saves and never noticed.

Thanks for the heads-up, will have to check what exactly is going on, I did use that method to make a Legends save for my ongoing playthrough. Not sure why I don't remember it screwing up the active save.

Yeah, that's why I posted my findings here.

This extra process normally shouldn't be needed (other than for organising your saves), but due to the bug that's overwriting timelines instead of producing new ones, you've gotta be a bit careful.

In this case, what seems to work is simply renaming your saves (I think something is broken in what should be telling the game to advance the numbers of each timeline save, so instead, it's just overwriting the first one over and over).

[Terminal]

What I do is, after generating a new world, I'll save a copy of it from the regions folder to the desktop, then after starting a game in fortress mode, I'll rename the folder and place it back. I then have a duplicate world I can use to view legends mode externally from fortress mode.

This does mean that you cannot view a current, updated version of legends mode until the fortress is retired however.

[High Lord Denix]

You guys do know you can just take a copy of your save, put it somewhere, then retire your fort to look at legends and put the copy back into the save folder when you're done to pick up where you left off right? It's a lot less convoluted than what ever is going on here.

[DuxAter]

Originally posted by High Lord Denix:

You guys do know you can just take a copy of your save, put it somewhere, then retire your fort to look at legends and put the copy back into the save folder when you're done to pick up where you left off right? It's a lot less convoluted than what ever is going on here.

Yeah, and some people might prefer to do that, but the point of this is that by the end of this process, you have 2 save "regions" or "worlds" for one setting. So all you have to do when you wanna look at legends is save and exit your game like normal, then open legends in the other save.

The point is that after messing with files once you create your world, you don't ever have to again for that world, so this method is more convenient for a long term world.

(Also, a neat bonus is that: if you start a game, you can open up a second instance of DF by force running with admin privileges, and then in the second DF, you can open up your legends save for that world. So you can browse legends while you're playing. I use it to create cool artefacts, or names, or symbols, based on my people's history).

The process seems complex in my little guide but it's really just:
-Start fort
-Save retired fort to new Timeline
-Rename file to "Legends/Active" to prevent overwriting bug
-Repeat x2

Then you have 2 saves you can use more intuitively than always messing with files.

[DuxAter]

Thanks for all the contributions on my post though guys, it's really cool and I appreciate it!

[76561188078797539]

Originally posted by DuxAter:

Thanks for all the contributions on my post though guys, it's really cool and I appreciate it!

Definitely appreciate all the important information I was unaware of brought forth!