Potions: A Curious Tale News

Hi Potions Masters!

Potions: A Curious Tale is now taking part in the Eastern Game Fest！
In this magical adventure, join Luna to meet friends from Eastern tales and solve all sorts of troubles together!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/378690/_/

Greetings, Potions Masters!

I hope you enjoy this latest update, which includes many improvements, bug fixes, and asset updates, including:

• Italian localization support
  
• New song for temples with variations for each temple
  
• Updated art assets for Sinbad, Deckhand, and Cory
  
• Failed recipe combinations are now saved (and shown in the potion preview)
  
• Extended final encounter (Temple of Life) design
  
• Grootslang audio issues resolved
  
• Fixed bug where stalactite hazards could be moved
  
• Fixed bug where fruit could be affected by potions while on the tree
  
• Fixed level collision issues in the Fire Mountain
  
• Fixed invulnerability bug
  
• Fixed bug that prevented Explosive Spear from shattering objects
  
• Fixed incorrect Imp name
  

We have another patch we are preparing with even more art asset updates, bug fixes, and quality of life improvements. We hope to enable Steam Cloud Saves with that patch as well.

Please let me know if you run into any issues and thank you so much for your support!

With Magic,

Renee

Greetings Potions Masters,

[h2]The Situation[/h2]

Due to unexpected issues around enabling Steam Auto-Cloud Save, some players may have had their main game save files overwritten by previous demo save information. (You can read more details about this issue here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/378690/view/7409056619623908850?l=english )

[h2]The Solution[/h2]

This build adds a "Recover Save" button to the Load Game screen, which attempts to rebuild a player's saves by scraping player log files on their machine. Please only use this functionality if your main save is missing and you are on the machine that you were playing on previously. This should recover your game progress, quests, collected cards, recipes, and bestiary entries. As recovering items and potions were not possible, it also provides 5 potions from every recipe you've learned.

[h3]If you have NOT started a new game or made new progress since you last played your lost save: [/h3]

- Select "Load"
- Select "Recover Save"

[h3]If you HAVE started a new game or made new progress since your lost save:[/h3]

If you would like to use the Recover Save function and have played the game since your save files disappeared, you will first need to clean your logs with the following steps.

- If you are trying to recover an old save and have started a new game since playing that save.
- Going into your save and log file location (makes sure hidden files are visible):

• Windows: C:\Users\[user]\AppData\LocalLow\Stumbling Cat\Potions_ A Curious Tale\
  
• Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Stumbling Cat/Potions_ A Curious Tale
  
• Linux: ~/.config/unity3d/Stumbling Cat/Potions_ A Curious Tale

- Make a copy of this folder in a safe location on your computer in case you accidentally remove a log file you need.

• You may also wish to do this even if you did not create a new game to further backup this process.

- Go into the Log folder.
- Remove the logs dated with your playtime of those "new" saves into a different file.
- Then use Recover Save.

If you have started a new game and do not remove the new game’s logs as described above, it will start adding your newer game quests to your more advanced save, causing confusing quest log information.

[h2]An Apology[/h2]

From the bottom of my heart, I am so very sorry about this incident. I never would have imagined a situation like this would have occurred from enabling the Steam Auto-Cloud Saves. It absolutely wrenches my heart to think that enabling this function has damaged the beloved saves of so many players. I hope that this recovery function helps any of those who have been affected. If you have any additional issues, questions, or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to me at: [email protected]


Thank you so much for your understanding.

Sincerely,

Renee

Hi everyone,

[h2]UPDATE: A Recover Save tool has been added to fix these issues:[/h2]
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/378690/view/7409056619626159608

The Situation

This afternoon around 4:45pm PT, I enabled the Steam Auto-Cloud Saves feature for Potions: A Curious Tale.

This has been a requested feature to allow for automatically uploading and sharing Potions: A Curious Tale saves between devices.

The enabling of this feature overwrote the current save of some players with previous demo save data or saves from another device (technical explanation below). I have spoken with Valve and they confirmed that this Steam Auto-Cloud Save replacement is a completely destructive action with no recovery.

I am so, so sorry for this. I know that many of you have put hours and hours into these saves and I had no idea that enabling this feature would put any of that at risk. Words cannot describe how awful I feel about this situation. You have my deepest and most sincere apologies.

Solutions

I have disabled Steam Cloud Saves. There is no way for me to use the Steam Cloud Saves in a manner that does not risk current player data without a rework of the current save system.

If you have been affected by this, please send me an email ([email protected]) with your damaged save file and a description of your current progress through the game, and I will personally craft you an updated save file. It won't have all of the data, but I can unlock the main story quest to your previous progression point and provide you with ample ingredients. If you remember any cards, discoveries, or other progressions of note (NPCs recruited, etc.) please also describe those and I will ensure they are all properly restored.

Your save files can be found at (make sure you enable the ability to see hidden files):

• Windows: C:\Users\[User]\AppData\LocalLow\Stumbling Cat\Potions_ A Curious Tale\savedGames.bacon
  
• Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Stumbling Cat/Potions_ A Curious Tale/savedGames.bacon
  
• Linux: ~/.config/unity3d/Stumbling Cat/Potions_ A Curious Tale/savedGames.bacon
  

I apologize if this recovery process takes a while, I will need to craft each of these by hand, but it will have my utmost priority.

UPDATE: I am currently working on a gameplay log scraper that aims to recover your progress, quests, bestiary, recipes, and collected cards. The current plan for this is to be added under the "Load" selection screen as a "Recover Save" button. This will hopefully be available soon, and I will post a patch with notes when that update comes out.

Technical Explanation

I made use of the Steam Auto-Cloud system to enable saves ( https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloud ) by setting the Auto-Cloud information settings in the main application's settings and by pointing the demo application's Auto-Cloud settings to its reference (as is recommended in the documentation). However, this cloud functionality was disabled, as I had "Enable cloud support for developers only" mode enabled.

It would seem the demo's Auto-Cloud settings, which were set through reference to the main application's settings, may have ignored this "Enable cloud support for developers only" on the linked application, meaning that Steam Auto-Cloud was enabled for demo save files, even though it was not enabled for the full game. This would have caused playing (and then closing) the demo version of the game to cause Steam to try to sync the cloud files, but the main game would not have triggered the cloud save recordings. [This has not been confirmed, but it is the only explanation I can find for the behavior I've seen.]

When I enabled the Steam Auto-Cloud Save ability, Steam only looks at the most recent file which has been saved/verified by the Cloud. Thus, if you had a savedGames.bacon file that was updated March 13th, but not ever synced to the cloud (because you were playing the main game), Steam Auto-Cloud Save would still replace it with a March 9th demo save, deeming the demo save "more relevant/recent" as it had been synced to the cloud while the newer version had not.

As Steam helpfully downloads Auto-Cloud Saves in the background, this may have affected a large number of users who had previously played the demo. I am not sure how far-reaching the impact is yet.

I have disabled the Steam Auto-Cloud Saves to try to prevent as much damage as possible.

An Apology

From the bottom of my heart, I am so very sorry about this incident. I never would have imagined a situation would like this would have occurred from enabling the Steam Auto-Cloud Saves. It absolutely wrenches my heart to think that enabling this function has damaged the beloved saves of so many players.

I will do everything within my abilities to correct this, so please send me an email and I will do everything I can to help you. I am so sorry.

Thank You,

Renee

Greetings, Potions Masters!

I've added made some minor quality of life improvements, some minor bug fixes, and made it possible to farm golems (useful for getting 100% achievements after the end of the game).

• Temple of Truth now provides a camera-zoom hint about needed solution
  
• Swapped water for air turrets in Fairy Forest 5
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause Luna to freeze if collecting multiple final items in Snow White quest
  
• Fixed gaps in Fire Mountain border
  
• Fixed Frost Golem to properly drop special loot
  
• Added Magma Golem for farming golem materials
  
• Fixed Swamp colliders to prevent aggressive enemies from pushing Luna out of bounds
  
• Changed Deep Dark Forest 1 shatterable rock colliders to allow passage when only destroying one rock
  
• Fixed minor grammar issues
  

With Magic,

Renee