Can I reconfigure Don't Starve to maintain my save data on Dropbox?

Question

I don't use Steam. I know that I probably could just use Steam to solve this problem, but I don't have an account, and I'm wondering if this is a solution.

On my Mac, Klei stores the saved data for Don't Starve in the Documents folder. I can manually copy this folder back and forth to Dropbox, and then I can keep the same level of progress on both of my computers. But, is there a way to configure the game to check my Dropbox folder for the saved game progress? Perhaps a mod or something that does this. I tried checking El Goog, and didn't find anything.

Answer 1

What you want to have happen is possible and is something I do with Terraria and other games of that ilk. But you have to get a little sneaky with it as most of the games are not going to do this for you. As per @FEichinger's comment, you will want to create a symbolic link where Don't Starve is saving the games so that it is actually putting them into a sub folder in your dropbox. This will then allow dropbox to automatically sync and update and the game will go to where it normally does for the data files not knowing they are in another location. That is the entire point of the symbolic link.

For Mac, I relink you to the article above. For Windows, you can use this plugin (which is what I use) to do the same thing. Note that setting this up can be a little tricky on windows with confirmations of opening/replacing. I just suggest you make a backup of your data while setting this up so that you can restore the proper data. This is probably a good idea on the Mac as well, just in case.

A word of caution. When I did this with Minecraft to copy my SSP games around, it can have some weird side effects because of how constantly or inconsistently it would touch certain files. If you run into this, depending on which files it is for which game, you may end up having to deal with some oddities (like my achievements would constantly reset). If they are critical this resolution may not work for that particular game.

Answer 2

OK, I've used the symbolic link method to make a Dropbox location for my saved games to sync between my two computers. Here is the MacOSX method for the Unix challenged (like myself):

On Computer A create a folder on your Dropbox folder. I called mine DoNotStarve. I didn't call it Don't Starve because I'm not sure if terminal commands can handle the space or ' in the name without resorting to special characters like %, etc. (Klei did the same with theirs.)

Next, on your hard disk go to Documents> Klei >DoNotStarve (These are folders nested inside your Documents folder)

Here you will see a folder called save. Drag this folder to your Dropbox\DoNotStarve folder. If this hasn't removed the original save folder from Computer A, drag it to the trash now.

Next open the Terminal app (located in Applications\utilities).

Type in the following:

cd ~\documents\klei\donotstarve
ln -s ~\dropbox\donotstarve\save

Next, on Computer B, install Don't Starve, enter the key, and update it.

Go to Computer B's Documents\Klei\DoNotStarve and drag the save folder to the trash.

Follow all the same Terminal instructions you did on Computer A.

This worked perfectly for me. I assume you cannot keep both apps open at the same time, though.

NOTE: You will have to install any mods separately to each machine using this method. I'm sure you could do the same thing to the mods within the contents of the app, but I have not tried it.