Apologies if this has been answered before, tried searching but couldn’t find anything, if we switch to the latest build should our old save files still work properly or should we start a new game?
hmm… pretty sure there was something similar asked awhile back, but can’t find it either…
anyways, i’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter, but if you want to do the most thorough testing you should probably make a new save when switching from stable to unstable…
i’ll page @sdee to see if the team has a preference…
I tried my old save for a little while, then the new save.
The old save mostly worked ok, the new features were available and all. The main issue I faced was that around 1/3 of my storage units reverted themselves to “none.” The secondary one was that the Quest for Township quest wouldn’t trigger and I had to use the debug tools to start it, which seems more a feature than a bug.
Anyway, I’m happily testing the latest version now. Love the updates thus far. Thanks 8BitCrab!
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Caveat: I’m relatively recent arrival around here - I started playing shortly after A16 was released, so I only know about recent history, and the relatively narrow slice of A16_release->A17_dev (and among A17_dev versions) save conversions.
Several of the recent ‘latest’ branch updates have changed storage filters. The storage containers seem to remember what they can store distinctly from what the UI shows us, so that old storage containers potentially look or behave oddly until you give them new settings, if the update changed filters in any way.
The main two other things that were changing (in a sounds-potentially-dangerous-for-old-save kind of way) in the A17 dev versions were building blueprints, and class traits - though both were mostly in the first few revisions, rather than lately iirc. Class traits wouldn’t update until you switched your hearthling out of the class and back; for a cosmetic case, the Engineer goggles weren’t on my pre-update Engineers.
How many of these conversion/update things actually cause problems (crashes/errors/etc), I have no idea. Personally, I don’t think I’ve run into any problems unique to using older saves in new versions, but I haven’t done it all that much either.
Whether you start a new save or keep the old ones seems to be a largely personal choice, and about what you want to be able to do with it. Losing your progress sucks, no question. But bug hunting can be a lot easier (well, less hard) if you don’t have to worry about conversion issues - which can be relevant to you because a ‘pure’ game will avoid any conversion-related problems, or because of a desire to optimally ‘help out’ with your reports of what does go wrong.
I personally tend to go for using ‘pure’ new games for that last reason - hoping that my reports of crashes/errors will be as useful as they can be. But that’s a choice - we are customers rather than quality assurance, after all 
(thought these devs are insanely responsive, to feedback and to reports of crashes and errors; definitely helps any QA-esque activity feel a lot more worthwhile, imo, since its clear it’s going to people who will give it a look, rather than some bug submission blackhole)
I think my original post was a little vague. I’m not too worried about losing progress. The game is very fun, but very clearly still a work in progress and I’m happy to help put the game through its paces. My question was really, are the dev’s interested in any conversion issues or are those not a concern currently? It seems as though mostly they aren’t a concern at this point, but I wanted to double check.
Thanks!
Sorry for the necro post here, but how did you go about doing that with debug tools? I can’t seem to find the right way to write the command to trigger it.