So it's probably not possible at this time but I figured I'd leave it here just for future possible modding? Currently, the game saves at the beginning of each day, which I'm actually fine with. But it's a single save system, which I personally don't like much. So I was thinking of the possibility of introducing an incremental save system at some stage? Nothing so awkward as creating a save every single day, but maybe a rotating save system between two save files. Day 1 = Save 1 -->Sleep --> Day 2 = Save 2--> Sleep --> Day 3 = Save 1, and so on and so forth. Having the option to rotate these saves means that, especially at this time with the infancy of SD modding, broken save files would be less of a risk...maybe? And at the very least, provides some save file redundancy for us perfectionists that hate it when crows steal our crops because we misplaced that damn scarecrow (I know this is part of the game, but options is options). I'm sure there are other good reasons for save file rotation (devs might like them too? I'm not a dev, I wouldn't know) but really it just lessens the impact of an "iron-man" save file system. Just a thought anyway. Thanks to all the hard-working mod makers that have made our game better so far.
It's definitely possible to do something like this using saving hooks. (In Storm now I think, in SMAPI soon) What I think is the best way might be to, just before saving, backup the previous save and delete once it falls past a certain amount. So like if you were keeping 3 days worth of saves you'd have this: Day 1 Saved: - save.save (Day 1) Day 2 Saved: - save.save (Day 2) - save-1.save(Day 1) Day 3 Saved - save.save (Day 3) - save-1.save(Day 2) - save-2.save(Day 1) Day 4 Saved: - save.save (Day 4) - save-1.save(Day 3) - save-2.save(Day 2) That means renaming each of the files every time, but it stop people having to mess with where the save file is and causing other issues.
I'd leave the implementation to those like yourself who know what that word soup means, but that idea definitely sounds good to me. If I had my way, 3 days would be the absolute limit for saves to stop save scumming, but that's not my call to make and if the option to decide the number of redundancies is possible, there's nothing stopping me from setting it to 2 or 3 and avoiding that temptation. I figured having this save system could also help mod makers compare two different daily saves to find out where the issues might be (if that's something you guys can do?).
I don't actually think you would really need to use the saving hooks since if we're just copying and renaming the files just file IO stuff should be fine if the game recognizes all the saves.
