Hi, first post here, just barging in to share a trick I discovered.
The Steam releases of DROD are a bit weird. Every official hold is released as DLC for Gunthro and the Epic Blunder, with the sole exception of The Second Sky, which is a whole separate app. This was bugging me immensely, and I dug around a bit to figure out how the official holds are stored/loaded and managed to import the official TSS hold into GatEB to have everything in one place,
as it should be. Apologies if this process is somehow a well-known thing, but I couldn't find such instructions anywhere.
I will reiterate that these instructions only work for the
Steam versions of these games, not the standalone releases or the GOG versions.
You must own both TSS and GatEB on Steam.
Note that following this guide will lead to two side effects:
1. Steam achievements for TSS will be broken (in-game Challenges will still work just fine).
2. Your install of GatEB will "
think"
that it's actually The Second Sky. What this means in practice is that the TSS logo/background are shown in the main menu when a hold other than the official main campaigns is being played. It's an entirely cosmetic difference.
So, here's the Few Easy Steps you need to follow:
Click here to view the secret text
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1. Install the Steam versions of both GatEB and TSS.
2. Open the TSS folder (right click the game in Steam ➡ Manage ➡ Browse local files). Once there, Navigate to "Data".
3. Repeat step 2 for GatEB, opening its Data folder as well.
4. Copy the drod-tss5_0_150.dat from the TSS Data folder to the GatEB one. You do not need any of the other files, they are identical between the two games.
5. Rename this file you just copied to drod5_0_150.dat.
6. Run GatEB and verify that The Second Sky now appears in your hold list (Play Game ➡ Change Location).
7. Export your TSS save and import it into GatEB (if you made any progress in that hold).
8. Uninstall the Steam version of TSS entirely and forget it even exists.
9. Enjoy the peace and tranquility brought about by only having one install of DROD on your PC.
For the
technically inclined, here are my discoveries about the .dat file loading process:
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1. GatEB loads all .dat files the names of which start with "drod5_0". TSS instead uses "drod-tss5_0". In the filenames below, this part of the name will be referred to as the prefix.
2. Any .dat files without these prefixes appear to be ignored altogether.
3. The .dat files are simply loaded alphabetically.
4. Unsure about this part, but I believe that the files must be loaded in the following order (and thus their alphabetic ordering must also be the same): Base game data ➡ Official campaign holds ➡ Smitemaster Selections. Breaking this order broke the game entirely when I was messing around with it.
5. The "base game data" is stored in files with numbers below 100. As of today, this includes prefix.dat, prefix_10.dat and prefix_20.dat.
6. The official campaign holds are stored in files the numbers of which are between 100 and 200. This currently includes prefix_110.dat (KDD), prefix_120.dat (JtRH), prefix_130.dat (TCB), prefix_140.dat (GatEB), and prefix_150.dat (TSS).
7. The files numbered above 200 are Smitemaster Selections. I haven't dug around to figure out which file is which SS, but I imagine they come in release order just like the official campaign holds do.
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