Save Files Grouped By World/Playthrough

[TheChucklesStart]

TL;DR

It would be nice if save files were grouped together by world so that it was easier to see all of the saves for this world/playthrough and harder to overwrite the save of another world/playthrough.

What?

The main goal of this idea is to provide a hierarchy of World/Playthrough -> Save Files instead of the flat save file organization currently used by Factorio.

Currently, in Factorio, save files are organized flatly without an hierarchy. This results in a save load menu that looks like the following.

06-22-2026, 17-25-19.png (1.33 MiB) Viewed 186 times

Notice how all of my games are mixed together, it is somewhat chaotic, especially since I have a few `active` playthroughs. (as you can see, I am currently not as active at the moment).

What I am proposing is that upon world generation, a folder for that world is created wherein all saves related to that world will live. This could result in a loading screen that would look like the following.

World Selection for Factorio Save Files.png (690.13 KiB) Viewed 180 times

Now, a tree view would be a more natural fit for this, but to my knowledge, there isn't a tree view widget in the Factorio GUI set, so this might be an easier implementation.

Why?

Out of the many games I have played, Factorio is one of the ones where I am most likely to have concurrent playthroughs. These playthroughs can be for different friend groups, making worlds for experimenting with new ideas, for having a place to design and keep a record of blueprints, to develop a mod or a mod set, etc.

The big problem with having multiple concurrent playthroughs is that if you want to make a hard save for that world, I tend to use the same file as I used previously for that world so that I don't get file explosion and can still easily find other worlds.

This results in a fairly high risk of accidentally OVERWRITING a previous save!

Admittedly, there have been previous attempts to fix this, this will be discuss that later.

I have seen this as a problem people have had on reddit, and I have experienced this myself. For new players especially, this can be very defeating. It is unreasonable for Factorio to expect its player base to have a good backup system that can save them, if this occurs.

Here are some examples of this happening since the attempt to deal with this:
viewtopic.php?p=599837
viewtopic.php?p=656740#p656740
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... save_file/
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... file_of_a/

Wasn't Autosave Overwriting Previously Addressed?

Accidental save file overwriting was partially addressed in viewtopic.php?p=475982#p475982 It is possible it was addressed elsewhere, but I didn't see anything about it.

Is this still useful?

Yes, this provides additional organization as well as much more protection than an additional "Are you sure?" prompt. The protection here is implicit and much harder to accidentally defeat. Furthermore, if the world naming is done upon world generation, even someone who doesn't yet understand the save system would have their autosaves protected (assuming they are in the world folder). An example of the last instance is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... d_my_save/

Why wasn't a better solution implemented previously?

Several posts do mention that doing something more complicated requires deeper reading of a save file, and that seems fair to me. However, this solution just requires understanding the world path in addition to the save file path, and if the world is just a folder inside of the saves directory and the save files live inside the world folder, then that is just a part of the save file path. No deeper reading of a save file required.

Why? Part 2

I don't want other reasons for this change to get overshadowed by save file overwriting, so here is a section with a few more reasons.

If all save files for a world live in a particular folder, including the autosaves, then there wouldn't need to worry about autosaves getting overwritten when switching to another world. This would also enable meaningfully useful quick saves without the issue of overwriting other playthrough quick saves. In a similar vein, it would allow useful exit saves so that players wouldn't necessarily have to worry about saving.

And if players could configure indefinite autosave retention, I suspect there would be a big social media explosion of videos of Factorio bases growing from start to finish. That seems like the type of oddly satisfying video that would occasionally gain traction outside of the Factorio social media realms.

Furthermore, I just started playing Solasta after playing Baldur's Gate 3. Solasta doesn't have the fit and finish of Baldur's Gate 3, and in my opinion, one place where it really stands out is Baldur's Gate 3 has per playthrough save organization and Solasta doesn't. It makes Solasta feel dated. So, with that, having this feature would help Factorio keep its reputation as an extremely polished game longer into the future, post development.

Old Save Files

There could be a 'world' that exists to house all of the flat saves that a user currently has. Then the behavior of Factorio wouldn't really change while working in this 'catch-all world' mode.

In addition, there could be a button that would convert a save into a new world. This might also be nice for a current world if you decide to diverge into different directions from some given point.

[angramania]

Factorio doesn't have a defined concept of a "world". What one player means by "world" can be very different from what another player means.
Current system is more flexible. If someone needs to organize saves by worlds/playthroughs, then he can just use name of world/playthrough as prefix and change sort mode from date to alphabetic.

[TheChucklesStart]

Perhaps I should have just used the term 'playthrough' instead of 'world', or maybe I should have used 'Star System'?

I have been trying to come up with a case where organizing saves into a folder for each playthrough makes save management more difficult and haven't been having much luck. The only scenario I have come up with is forking a playthrough for some reason (such as having a save allowing future playthroughs to skip to a particular stage or seeing how different techniques effect your base from some given point).

In this case, I can see save management being more annoying as you effectively have different playthroughs living in the same 'playthrough' as the game sees it. However, I did suggest that this change come with a button to promote a save into a new playthrough, so in my mind that fixes the issue of forking a save.

Do you have scenario where this system would increase the burden of save management?

[EvilPLa]

nvm, didn't read the replys

[AbstractHand]

It is already possible to do this, you just have to create the folders in your file explorer. Factorio will show all the folders in the directory, allowing you to browse in and out of them to keep each playthrough contained. A "create folder" button would be really lovely, though.

[TheChucklesStart]

Oh, wow. I didn't know that. That is pretty awesome.

I just played with it, and here are the things that are missing from my vision of how this should work:

• Ability to create a folder.

• Ability to move a save from one folder to another.

• Ability to have the autosaves save to a non-root folder.

• Default safe behavior where a new playthrough starts with a new folder and with the autosaves configured to save to that folder.
  • The most important, I think

I feel like the process of setting autosave location manually is somewhat fraught with peril, since it could cause undesired results if the save is moved around. So perhaps, setting the autosave location should happen automatically based off of these rules:

• On world creation, autosave location is set to the folder that was created for the world (assuming default safe behavior is implemented)

• On save load, autosave location is set to the folder where the save is located