Holocure Save File Restore

Background

Holocure is a fan-made content by the animator Kay Yu in the form of a survival, roguelike, shoot ‘em up game. The gameplay mechanics are similar to those of the game Vampire Survivors. The game content features Hololive characters, who are Virtual YouTubers (vtubers), along with their references and signature items.

The game target platform is win32.

Problem Statements

  • You want to continue your Holocure progress on another Windows machine.
  • You have a backed up save file save.dat.
  • You can only download the latest version of Holocure.
    • You don’t have access to the version of assemblies that generated the save.dat.
  • You don’t trust scripts and tools on the Interweb, preferring to do it manually.
    • You are somewhat competent at more technical computing concepts & operations.

Methodology

Restore Steps

On your brand spanking new machine

  • Generate the initial save folder
    1. Download the game from official release channel https://kay-yu.itch.io/holocure.
    2. Launch the game for the first time.
    3. Get to the game main menu.
    4. Exit it.
  • Get content of new save.dat file. All steps in this section are performed on the new save directory that the game generates by default.
    1. Win + R{’ ‘}
    2. Paste this path in and hit Enter: 
      %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Holocure
    3. ⚠ Make a backup immediately ⚠
      • Right-click save.dat > Copy > CTRL + V
      • Name the copy save.dat.bak or something
    4. Open save.dat file there with a text editor
      • save.dat: ASCII text, with very long lines (1560), with no line terminators
      • The file is encoded in base64
    5. Copy all the content and paste it into a decoder like base64
      • Or use base64 CLI in WSL base64 -d save.dat >> save.decoded.
    6. Sample decoded file:
    7. You are probably seeing a string like this: 
      y4ݴouy{F{sm}^svi8s6}{Vk{ "food": 1.0, "specUnlock": 1.0, "haste": 2.0, "holoCoins": -136.0, "unlockedItems": [ "BodyPillow", "FullMeal", "PikiPikiPiman", "SuccubusHorn", "Headphones", "UberSheep"........
    8. Look for randomMoneyKey attribute and write down its the numeric value
      • Example: "randomMoneyKey": 420.0
      • This is a randomly generated “key” that acts as an anti-cheat for the money you have.
    9. Pay attention to the first non-sensical word in double quotes you can see
      • In this case, "food"
    10. Trace backwards to the closest open curly bracket {
    11. Copy the portion from and including that bracket till the end and including the weird box character.
    12. Paste into the tool
    13. Re-encode the string segment into base64
      • You get something like eyAiZm9vZCI6........
      • This gives you the starting point of the actual saved progress of the game.
    14. So, back in the save.dat, find where the segment you got from the previous step is and yeet that.
    15. Save the modified save.dat file.
    16. This step concludes the preparation of the local save directory.
  • Prepping the backed up save.dat file containing your progress
    1. Download or transfer the file to your new machine.
    2. For concision, this guide assumes you paste the save.dat file on your %USERPROFILE%\Desktop
    3. Open the file with a text editor
    4. Decode it
    5. Look for the randomMoneyKey attribute
    6. Change its value to the number you got from the default file at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Holocure\save.dat
      • In this case, 420.0
    7. With that value change, like the logic you did with the default file
      • Find the first non-sensical word in that string
      • Trace backwards to the closest open curly bracket {
      • Copy the portion from and including that bracket till the end and including the weird box character.
    8. Paste the copied string to the encoder
    9. Re-encode it.
    10. Copy the re-encoded string.
  • Back to the directory %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Holocure\
    1. Open the save.dat file if you have not already.
    2. Paste (append) the copied string right after whatever is there, make sure there’s no whitespace Space.
    3. Save it.
  • Re-open HoloCure
  • Et voila, it is back.

Backup Strategies

Cloud Sync

  • I use Google Drive to automatically back up that specific folder 
    %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Holocure
    Since I have Google Drive desktop installed already on all my computers.
  • But, to be noted that you would only need the save.dat file to properly restore your progress.

Shadow Copy

  • You can make a shadow copy of the folder.
  • Won’t go into details, there are guides out there on the internet.
  • Copy that blob to your new machine.

Practice 3-2-1

High resilient data recovery strategy in the event of any type of disaster, except Earth’s complete destruction.

  • 3 daily backups.
  • 2 on-site (different machine/server, on a NAS, on a cold storage medium like tape, on a USB key).
  • 1 off-site (preferably different region).

Backstory

Because I wanted to continue my Holocure progress on my laptop while lying on my bed, I needed to transfer the progress from my desktop tower. That’s it, lol 😂.

Contact, assistance request, bug report

ℹ Please submit an issue at https://github.com/aaanh/ml/issues.