itch.io

The last version I played on was 1.5 so this may be different for people with 1.7 saves, but I think it should work the same. What I did which seems to work is I copied my old save file from %appdata%/LocalLow/ArvusGames/StarmakerStory. Then I started the new game (1.8). I waited until the first savepoint, then closed the game. I went to the same directory from above and now there is a new folder called SAVES. I went inside that, then inside NANOSAVE_0001, and you should see a compressed folder called SAVES.GZ. I extracted this onto my desktop (make sure you have a backup if you've made significant progress on the new version), and removed the SAVE file from it. Now I had two save files, one from the old version (with progress), and one from the new version (no progress).

Then, I opened the old 1.5 save.json file in notepad, copied all the text from it, then replaced all of the text in the new version with what I'd copied.

Next, I used 7zip to recompress the now-rewritten SAVE (1.8) file into a gzip folder. Winrar doesnt have the ability to do gzip I'm pretty sure, so you'll have to download 7zip if you don't have it. I renamed this folder to SAVE.GZ, and replaced the SAVE.GZ file from my %appdata% SAVES/NANOSAVE_0001 with this newly compressed folder.

When I loaded up the game I seemed to have all the progress from my previous playthrough (money/journal/skills all seemed correct enough) but I haven't played through yet so it is possible there are catastrophic downstream effects. Also you will probably miss some content if you do this. Hence why you should backup both saves before doing this.

But I have no interest in replaying the whole game so if this doesn't work out then I am probably dropping it anyway, which sucks since it is a really really good game. I wish more developers had ways of transferring saves between updates but I can understand why that would be difficult with a content overhaul such as this.