When do you consider quick save editing acceptable (as in, when is it not cheating)?

[PTNLemay]

CLARIFICATION: The poll isn't about "how to play the game" overall, so much as how people themselves each feel about editing. I want to point this out in the hopes of negating any potential flame wars.

1) Never, I play legit, or not at all.

2) If my hard drive is rendered inoperable, I'll recreate my some stuff.

3) Whenever the game bugs out. The game broke it, I'm just unbreaking it.

4) Whenever one of my saves is screwed up, even if it was my own fault (hitting quickload when I shouldn't have).

5) All the time, but just for experimenting. I have a save dedicated to legit gameplay where I never edit.

6) Whenever I want, it's just a game!

I used to think that I was 3, that I'lll only mess with it when it's the games fault. But I just spent a good hour setting up a perfect orbit around Laythe... thinking that i quick saved, made an error, then quick-loaded to before I performed that whole complicated orbital insertion... So I opened the quick save file and manually set everything to the good orbit I had. I don't think it was cheating, but I acknowledge it's a thin line. And I can see how some purists would call it cheating.

Edited August 28, 2013 by PTNLemay
Clarification

[Guest]

Personally, I only quick save before attaching and "docking" KAS parts because of a well-known alignment bug. Otherwise I don't bother, considering it to be "cheating".

E: Oh, editing... Yeah, that makes you a dirty, dirty cheater.

Edited August 28, 2013 by regex

[PTNLemay]

@ Regex

Really? Not even for a particularly difficult landing you're worried you might flop?

Also, I realize I could have added a 7th option (or rather an additional option before the first one). "I never even use the quick save, so no need to edit it."

EDIT:

BLAST! I just saw a typo in the poll, 2nd option. I'm guessing there's no way to fix that?

Edited August 28, 2013 by PTNLemay

[Guest]

@ Regex

Really? Not even for a particularly difficult landing you're worried you might flop?

Nope. Well, I did once before I landed on Eeloo and I'm glad I did because I ascended into an opposite orbit from my transfer vehicle (I had never done that before). But after quick loading I splattered the lander and decided to call it good. Now I only use quick save when there's the very real possibility that the game doesn't like me, and you most certainly will not see me using it during a Grand Tour. Makes things exciting.

[Johnno]

Oh, editing... Yeah, that makes you a dirty, dirty cheater.

I have to agree with regex here. Cheating is breaking the rules and rules are in place to ensure the enjoyment of the game for everyone, I'm actually so apalled by your blatant disregard for the game's rules that I'm tempted to contact your ISP to get you banned off the internet for life so you can't poison the minds of a whole generation of gamers by telling them how you cheat in a singleplayer game.

Honest youngsters who've put blood sweat and tears into learning how to play this game will now simply turn to cheating because of you. For shame... for shame.

[PTNLemay]

What can I say, I'm a rebel.

Seriously though, it is a sandbox. And the beauty of a sandbox is that you set your own rules. It is interesting to see where people's opinions stack up, and we do seem to be getting a very bipolar split so far. All or nothing, as it were.

[Force21]

I never use the electricity reactors either. Electricity that comes from yourself is weird...

[Tiron]

I used to edit it a bit to remove debris, but that's gotten a LOT easier to do in game if I really want to (though I've moved on to where I consider even THAT cheating.) I've also been known to reset Kerbals to 'alive' status (Not anymore, though.) Or to try to fix it when it failed to flag someone as in flight(Which I haven't seen happen in 0.21 yet.)

I *did* recently edit it to add a group of four kerbals, one at each extreme of the Courage/Stupidity chart, for testing purposes (Specifically, to check if Stupidity was in fact backwards...and decided that despite the very explicitly defined reaction, which way it is is almost completely open to interpretation.) I should really probably get rid of them, now the testing's done... keep forgetting to. Never actually gonna put them on a real flight though.

Edited August 28, 2013 by Tiron

[annallia]

I voted for the whenever you want bit, after all this is a game.

That said I don't use it myself. Mostly because I forget to save...

[Captain Sierra]

Until the day that KSP has multi-player, cheating doesn't matter. It's a personaly opinion and my opinion is if I can do it, I will do it.

[The Destroyer]

Personally I make quicksaves at every important part. I'm doing less and less though, because I forget

Especially on landing, if I make a REALLY STUPID mistake.

[technicalfool]

Can't say I've ever edited the savegame, but not over some purist notion of cheating. More like "can't be bothered".

If I did, then I'd be most likely to edit the game to unbreak a bug. That said, trying out some Danny-esque experiment might be fun. Sending half a moon's worth of rocket stack down the Mohole perhaps? 100km-high launch stability enhancers for the lulz?

It's not cheating. It's "manually enhanced gameplay". That's my excuse, your honour, and I'm sticking to it.

[adinfinitum]

I've only edited the persistence once before, and that was to try and fix a docking port not wanting to reactivate so it could dock again, and my lazy bum didn't want to take the 10 minutes to undock the part and then the tug, then redock it all. Took about an hour and a half messing with the persistence file, and it still didn't fix it. I just gave in and did the undocking/redocking and it fixed it.

Honestly, I hardly ever use the quicksave so I guess the issue doesn't come up for me very much.

[Bobnova]

Wait, you can edit the quicksaves? That's news to me. I won't, though.

I use quicksave before important things sometimes, but I rarely actually load even when I screw something up. Failure is part of the game for me, and I enjoy having some scenery of "Spacecraft Whatever Mk2.34 Debris" lying around.

[Tiron]

Wait, you can edit the quicksaves? That's news to me. I won't, though.

I use quicksave before important things sometimes, but I rarely actually load even when I screw something up. Failure is part of the game for me, and I enjoy having some scenery of "Spacecraft Whatever Mk2.34 Debris" lying around.

It's just a text file (some form of XML I believe?). Very hand-editable. The .craft files are too (in fact, the structure of a vessel in persistent.sfs is nearly identical to its structure in the .craft file.) Just don't screw up the {} brackets.

[TheHockeyPlayer]

I quicksave all the time; I mainly use it to fix a stupid mistake that I made. Someday, when I become better at playing the game, I'll stop quicksaving, but for now I'm happy with what I'm doing.

[spectrhz]

I always seem to find these threads a bit biased, how is something that's put in the game for a specific use and used for it cheating? I'm not saying anyone is saying that or assuming, I'm just getting that vibe. Nevertheless, if people don't want to quicksave, they won't. As people have said before, you can't really cheat at a sanbox. This reminds me of mod arguments and debug menu, is someone standing over your head holding you at gunpoint and not allowing you to use it? I hope not o___o

[Guest]

I always seem to find these threads a bit biased, how is something that's put in the game for a specific use and used for it cheating? I'm not saying anyone is saying that or assuming, I'm just getting that vibe. Nevertheless, if people don't want to quicksave, they won't. As people have said before, you can't really cheat at a sanbox. This reminds me of mod arguments and debug menu, is someone standing over your head holding you at gunpoint and not allowing you to use it? I hope not o___o

There are two rules to follow on the KSP forums:

• Any time someone mentions "cheating" in the OP, assume it is an opinion thread.
  
• Any time someone tells you how to play, assume they're either trolling you or just being a idiot.

This is an opinion thread. Any mentions of how someone else is cheating should be read dripping with sarcasm. If the author was serious, then they're just being an idiot.

[Zeroignite]

Folks, read the thread title. This is about manually editing your quicksave.sfs or persistence.sfs file.

As for me, I've done it twice. The first was to resurrect Bill and Samfred Kerman, after being forced to terminate a rover where they were just stuck ragdolled and bugged in the seats without any control. The second time was to update the resource information of a mod part when a mod update didn't refresh properties of already-flying parts.

[Spyritdragon]

I regularly use the quicksave feature - i try to keep my game realistic, but i also revert my flights when they crash during takeoff. I mainly use quicksave as either a 'return to last stable orbit' or as a 'return to last parking position', when i'm driving a rover.

Savefile editing, up to now only to insert a specific Kerbal from my .20 savefile into my .21, but i'd probably also do it to merge savefiles at some point.

Actually editing a quicksave file or persistence file to put my ship somewhere specific, which i have never done yet, i will only do in case it's a high-stakes or long mission which fails due to something that i couldn't have helped at all, like my computer or KSP bugging out.

If my hard drive fails, i'd most likely just put my best Kerbonauts back in and start anew. Its not like i have that many ships up yet.

[nhnifong]

Since KSP's entire aerodynamic model might as well be considered a bug, I'm frequently using quicksave to work around "bugs". (when I'm not using FAR)

[spectrhz]

There are two rules to follow on the KSP forums:

• Any time someone mentions "cheating" in the OP, assume it is an opinion thread.
  
• Any time someone tells you how to play, assume they're either trolling you or just being a idiot.

This is an opinion thread. Any mentions of how someone else is cheating should be read dripping with sarcasm. If the author was serious, then they're just being an idiot.

Aarg! My apologies, I didn't read the thread title correctly I may have come off a bit crotchety, I was just up from a nap reading threads.

[Guest]

Aarg! My apologies, I didn't read the thread title correctly I may have come off a bit crotchety, I was just up from a nap reading threads.

Don't take it personally.

[tntristan12]

I've used save file editing for a number of reasons:

-Sometimes to simulate something like one of my fuel tanks being replaced by cargo, and removing the fuel to simulate the loss in mass.

-Before I had the TAC fuel balancer mod, I'd use it to balance fuel in different tanks.

-When I want to put things in an exact orbit then plan on never touching it again (i.e. commsats) I will place it in as close an orbit as possible then edit it the rest of the way. I just pretend it's being maintained by stationkeeping maneuvers.

-If I want to move a part of my base to one direction or other by a few meters, I'll edit it. My reasoning is that the kerbals on the base are moving things around.

-If a mod or the base game bugs out and I lose something I wouldn't have otherwise lost, and I can't fix it by quickloading. For example, one time quantum struts were making my space station explode upon loading, so I disabled them in the save file.

There's many reasons for save file editing and none of what I have listed really strike me as "cheating" which indeed doesn't seem possible in a single player sandbox game.

[SkyRender]

Quicksaves are a matter of necessity when using mods at this point, particularly if you're using multiple mods that might have unexpected negative synergies. As for quicksave editing, well... I think it's only really justified when what you're doing with it is something you can't really do in-game no matter what (like getting an absolutely perfect geosynchronous orbit; I see no problem with cleaning up the SMA of geosync'd satellites as long as you at least got them as close as possible to geosync to start with).