Game Save System for Campaign/Classic/Career

Guide on how to create a savegame that can be used to save your game progress and load back to that point when your squad inevitably gets wiped.

Intro

This is a very difficult game, and that's great, but sometimes with the brutality of the campaign you might want to be able to create a save, then reload when a high-level soldier dies or your squad gets wiped by a flamethrower. This guide will show you how to create two .bat files, one that "saves" your game's state in a separate file, and another that "loads" that save back into your game.

Finding your savegame

First, create a folder wherever you want to save/load your game from. For me, this is from the desktop, but it doesn't make a difference.

Next, you need to locate your MNB save file. This is located in
C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\mnb\saveMNB3.lua


Make a copy of the saveMNB3.lua file and place it into your new save/load folder. It's also a good idea to keep an extra copy somewhere if you have a high-level save that you're really attached to, as the load function will replace that save with whatever you have in the file later on.

Creating the .bat files

Now that you have the save file separate from the game, and your folder created, you can make the .bat files. Start by creating two new text documents in your folder, I named them "save" and "load" but you can call them whatever you want.
Open up the save file and copy/paste the following, replacing the bold sections with your username and the path of your new save file. The easiest way to get the save file path is by opening the properties of the new file, and copying the path from there.

@echo off
set "sourceFile=C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\mnb\saveMNB3.lua"
set "destinationFile=<your new save file>\saveMNB3.lua"
echo Copying file %sourceFile% to %destinationFile%
copy /Y %sourceFile% %destinationFile%
echo Mud And Blood Campaign Saved!
pause


Once you've finished with the contents of the file, click "save as" and name the file save.bat to create the bat file. Next, you can start the new bat file and see if it works. If it does, you should get a message letting you know that the save file from the game has been copied and saved to your new folder.

Next, you can open up your "load" file, and copy/paste just like the save file. The code for this one is the exact same as the save file but reversed.

@echo off
set "sourceFile=<your new save file>\saveMNB3.lua"
set "destinationFile=C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\mnb\saveMNB3.lua"
echo Copying file %sourceFile% to %destinationFile%
copy /Y %sourceFile% %destinationFile%
echo Mud and Blood Campaign Loaded!
pause

Now click "save as" and name the file load.bat . If your file paths were correct, clicking on this bat will load the file in the folder into the game's save folder. After both files are created, your folder should look like this:

How to use it

Now that both of your bat files are working, you can start playing again. The best way I've found to use this is to save the game at the start of a campaign mission or "good spot" in a classic game, and if(when) something terrible happens, exit the game, click the "load" file, and then restart the game. When you start the mission again you will be wherever you last ran the "save" file. If you value your save, make sure not to click the "save" button by accident, as it will save whatever state the game is in when it is ran. Again, I recommend having an extra backup somewhere if you're super attached to a certain save or you are at a very hard part of a game. That's all, let me know if you have any questions in the comments, but it's overall a very simple process.

[maousaki]

Thank you works fine. Just one thing the folder where you save the files on your desktop must not have a space, otherwise it doesn't work.

[Red Romanov]

What/are there any changes you should make to make classic saves?