I got burned on this after my initial contact after buying this game... opened up some load-outs (or ship variants) after a few games only to have my HD crash. Of course all of that was lost after I reinstalled Windows. Also, I mostly play the game on my Win 8 tablet, but when I take a business trip I'd like to have the option to play it on my laptop. Soooooo, is there a way to have the savegames be forced to a something like a dropbox directory so I can start where I left off, or at least still have my ship variant options open?

Thanks!

Well it's pretty easy to copy the files to another location manually, but I don't think you can force the game to do that automatically. If you really wanted to automate it you could use a backup program or small script to back it up periodically.

For Windows systems the profile should be located at:

<UserDir>\My Documents\My Games\FasterThanLight

where <UserDir> is your user directory for your system, e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\<Your User Name>\ on Windows XP.

Then just copy the files in this directory to your backup location - they all in in .sav. You should have at least an ae_prof.sav, maybe a prof.sav (pre-AE FTL), and maybe another .sav if you've saved a game in progress.

When you want to use your other device, simply copy it to the equivalent location on the second device before running it (I'd run it once after installing it for the first time though, as this should create the proper directories/files and will ensure you copy the files to the right place).

I believe what you want is called a soft symbolic link or symlink. Here is info on how to do it in windows.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/

just move the save file to your dropbox directory and symlink the file to location where ftl expects it. Ftl will then write and read to the destination where the symlink is leading. (providing you are using windows Vista or above)

Whoops, totally forgot about good old environment variables! Didn't actually know Windows (finally!) added "proper" symbolic links like Linux/UNIX! You learn something new every day...

Believe it or not, it was looking for a solution to this very problem that I found out Windows currently had them. :)
As a long user of OSX and Ubuntu, It made me quite happy as well.


Didn't think of environment variables either. Now I feel kind of silly... Oh well, it's good info to know anyway.

Thanks for the replies guys... i've been backing up the files from the Mydocs\games\ftl directory but it seems that the game was also saving the "accomplishments" info to another file that was in the "OneDrive" directory. I deleted the files int he onedrive directory thinking they were not needed and my accomplishments were reset back to 0 but my savegame was still fine.

Starting over AGAIN! gRRRR.

Couldn't you copy the ae_prof.sav from your backup over the newly-created (i.e. no accomplishments) file in your OneDrive directory, in addition to copying it into over the one in Mydocs\games\ftl? Surely that would work, unless of course you mean that you didn't copy the ae_prof.sav since it was only in the OneDrive - in which case, damn.

On the plus side, now you're going to get more practice. :)

You might try Game Save Manager:

http://www.gamesave-manager.com/