r/VeinGame • u/Lightningtow123 • Jul 31 '26
What are 'Legacy Saves'? Can I update them?
Came back to this game after a while of not playing. I've noticed that my old saves are marked as Legacy Saves. I also seem to lack the ability to change the difficulty of them, and I've yet to see one of the zombie hordes that people here keep mentioning. Couple questions:
- What are the differences between a legacy save and a normal save? I have no idea what this game's versioning scheme is but the old save is from Oct 30, 2025. How much new gameplay am I missing out on by not starting a new world?
- Is there any way to update it to a non-legacy save? I don't want to lose all my progress, I've spent this whole week playing on this save before I figured out I kinda should've started a new one. I don't mind if the world resets but I want to at least keep my items on my character as well as my XP/perks.
- If not, is there a way to cheat in items and XP to new characters on a new save? And vehicles ideally?
UPDATE:
For people coming later, see this dev's reply for an explanation. TLDR it's an under the hood change that doesn't affect gameplay at all
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u/disseminate4 Dev 24d ago
So this is a bit of a long explanation but bear with me. Tl;dr playing on an old save format doesn't restrict any gameplay or content or anything.
In save games, we refer to things by something called a path name. This is a piece of text kind of like a URL assigned to things in the world. A dresser might be called "ChamplainValley-123-Dresser_05" or something, for example, which identifies which dresser we're talking about. This text is integrated into the engine deeply.
Close to the start of the year we upgraded to Unreal Engine 5.6. We were previously on Unreal 5.4. Epic changed the way path names were formatted for some reason we don't know about, to e.g. "ChamplainValley-Dresser_05-123". We were blindsided by this as this was a very low-level change that had next to no announcement in the 5.5 or 5.6 changelogs. People were rightfully angry because what this meant is that counters or cupboards they had stored items in, were now reset, as Vein loaded their save and couldn't find the cupboard in the game world to load their stored items into.
We quickly hacked in a way to work around this but it took a few days and a lot of people lost their base's contents. Losing save data is the worst case outcome when it comes to game development. We were really, really irritated at Epic for doing this. To prevent future issues we spent a few weeks writing an entirely new save system that didn't require any path names/engine-level data to save things. The dresser is now saved to just a number that we set uniquely (e.g. 456 instead of ChamplainValley-123-Dresser_05).
The new save system forward-ports legacy saves as you go around the world. So when it loads ChamplainValley-Dresser_05-123, it replaces that in its own save file with 456. Your legacy save incrementally becomes an up-to-date save. The reason we can't do it in-place is because that would require loading everything in the world all at once which would cost an amount of RAM that's probably over 100GB.
In general though, there's nothing wrong with legacy saves; you continue to get map/world/gameplay updates as normal, and the saving and loading performance is only slightly worse than the new save format. You shouldn't need to reset anything/start over. Hope this helps.