Saving

Every character has a save of its own. You can stop a run and continue it later, and keep several characters going side by side. There are no manual save slots and no going back: saves are for continuing, not for retrying.

Death is final. When you die (see Combat), that character’s save is deleted at once. Your other characters are untouched. A run that has ended is never saved again, since there is nothing to continue.

When the game saves

• When a run starts, so a new character is saved at once.
• When you close the window (no question asked).
• When you choose Save and quit to menu or Quit in the pause menu (Esc) and answer Yes. Quitting always asks first: y, or Enter on Yes, confirms; n, Esc, or Enter on No (the default) cancels. You can bind a “Save and quit” key in the Controls screen; it asks too.
• Automatically every 50 turns.
• Automatically when you change level.

On the web the page is also saved when it is hidden or closed.

Your characters and the graveyard

Continue on the main menu resumes the character you played last, and names them. It appears only if a character that this version of the game can continue is saved.

Characters lists every saved character: name, race and class, and level. For the one selected it also shows where they are and when you last played them (in UTC). Press Enter to resume one, or Delete to delete one for good (the game asks first). A character saved by another version of the game is listed as made by that version. It cannot be continued, and Continue skips it, but you can still delete it.

Graveyard appears once any character has died. It lists every fallen character, the one with the most experience at the moment of death first: name, race and class, level, and experience, then what killed them, where, when (in UTC), and how old they were. Characters who died before the game began keeping their experience count as 0 and come last, the highest level first. If the list is longer than the screen, the arrow keys or > and < turn the page; Esc goes back.

New run lets you create a character for the Ascmearc and starts a fresh run with a save of its own. It never touches your other characters.

Where saves are kept

Desktop. Each character’s save is a file in the saves folder of the game’s data folder, named after the character with a number: brakka-1.sav. Beside it, brakka-1.toml holds what the list of characters shows. A second Brakka is brakka-2. Your settings are settings.toml in the configuration folder:

Logs and crash reports are in a logs folder: on macOS and Linux inside the data folder, on Windows in %LOCALAPPDATA%\ascmearc\data\logs.

To see the exact folders for your launch, and why they are there, run ascmearc --paths, or open Settings, then Where are my files?, which also has an Open folder action for each.

Portable mode

To keep everything with the game, for a USB stick or a game folder you can copy, make an empty folder named ascmearc-data next to the game (on macOS, next to Ascmearc.app, not inside it). The game then keeps its settings, key bindings, saves, and logs in it:

ascmearc --portable does the same, and makes the folder if it is missing. ascmearc --portable DIR uses the folder DIR instead. When several apply, the first of these wins: --config-dir and --save-dir (each for its own folder), then --portable DIR, then an ascmearc-data folder next to the game, then the standard folders above. If a portable folder cannot be written to (a read-only disk), the game says so and carries on. It reads what is there but does not save.

ascmearc --move-data native moves a portable folder’s files into the standard folders and renames the emptied folder to ascmearc-data.moved-<date>. ascmearc --move-data portable [DIR] does the reverse. Add --dry-run to see the plan first. Nothing is overwritten: a file already there is kept as NAME.bak-<time>. It will not run while the game is running.

From Warlock. The game was called Warlock before version 0.18. The first time the new version starts, it moves your files from the old folders (warlock in place of ascmearc above, or a warlock-data folder next to the game) to the new ones, and in the browser from the old storage. Your settings, keys, and graveyard carry over. Saves from before 0.18 do not load, as after any update. The game only moves files where the new place is still empty, and notes each move in its log.

Browser. Saves and settings are kept in your browser’s local storage for the page, under ascmearc/saves/ (ascmearc/saves/brakka-1.sav). They survive reloads. If the browser blocks storage (some private modes do), the game runs but cannot save, and writes a warning to its log. If the browser runs out of room, a message appears on the message line.

Good to know

• A save only works in the version of the game that made it. After an update, your earlier characters stay on the list, marked as made by another version, and cannot be continued. The older version of the game can still continue them.
• A save that cannot be read at all is renamed (brakka-1.sav.bad), never deleted, and no longer shown in the list of characters.
• Saves from before each character had its own (a single run.sav) are left where they are and not read.
• The status bar shows the run’s seed: give it when you report a problem with a run.

See also: Your character, Hit points and death, and Settings.