To be added in the future: how to start from a specific checkpoint if both you and your friend lost the save file

If you have for any reason lost your save file, even if you play with the same friend you will have to start from scratch and replay all the levels until you get back to where you originally were. This guide covers how you can edit your save file so that you can recover any lost progress

DISCLAIMER1: This could be abused to skip levels and progress past where you are supposed to be in the game. I DO NOT RECOMMEND OR ENDORSE anyone using this guide in such a malicious way. The game is relatively simple and it comes from an indie developer, please play it as intended and only use this if you lost progress you already had with your friend.

DISCLAIMER2: We are directly editing the game's save file. Editing stuff you shouldn't may break the game or corrupt your save. I strongly recommend that you backup all game files before doing any of the steps in this guide so that you don't completely ruin your game if anything goes wrong.

This requires at least one of you or your friend to still have the save file you originally played. For convenience, from this point onwards I will use 'player A' to refer to the person who lost their save, and 'player B' to the person who still has it. Follow the steps below to find the file:

1. Press Windows key + R
   
2. Type %appdata% and hit enter
   
3. You will be under the 'Roaming' folder. Go back one folder and then go to:
   
   LocalLow > tokoronyori > Bokura

We are looking for a file named "SaveFile.es3". We will leave this unchanged for player B, but B's file will work as a guideline for us to edit A's save.

From this point we will be directly editing your save file for the game. I strongly recommend that you backup everything under the 'BOKURA' folder in case anything goes wrong during the modification, that way you can follow the guide again (or ask for help if it seems the guide is incorrect) as many times as needed.



The saves in this game are stored in a JSON-like format, meaning everything is stored in a 'key': 'value' format. First, find your User ID. This will be something like:

"UNIQUE_ID" : {
"__type" : "int",
"value" : 123456
}

Progress is stored using the format [PLAYER1_ID]_[PLAYER2_ID]_[PROGRESS]. Here 'Player 1' would be whoever created the room when you first played together, but as far as I can tell you can change the order without any negative effects.

As an example, the choice between going with the robot world or with the animal world is stored as

"123456_789123_SELECT_CHARACTER" : {
"__type" : "bool",
"value" : true
}

If you have played with multiple people, you will see 'duplicated' keys because each of them will be associated with a separate play-through.

Now, what causes progress to be lost is that your player ID may change when you switch computers/reinstall the game. Go to Player B's save file and use any of the progress markers to find what Player A's original ID was. Following the previous examples, if B's ID is 123456, then from the 'SELECT_CHARACTER' progress marker we can see that A's ID used to be 789123. Go to A's save file and replace the UNIQUE_ID using this value.

Now, using B's save file as a guide, you want to copy all progress markers and paste them in A's save file. Pay attention that you don't miss any comma or brackets as that would break the file.

One particular case is for the SELECT_CHARACTER marker. This will be different for each of the two players! Setting the value to 'true' gives the player the robot world, and setting it to 'false' will give the animal world. Edit this according to which world you picked in the original gameplay.

Lastly, you will also see a READEVENT key in the save file. The value stored here keeps track of all the events you have seen in game. Copy Player B's value and use it to replace A's value.

Done! Now you should be good to start your game and continue from where you had stopped. I have not tested editing individual key/value pairs in the save file, so it may be the case that it's not necessary to edit everything I have covered. However, these are the steps I followed to recover the save I had with a friend, so it should still work just fine. I plan to edit this guide in the future to add more information in case both of you lost the save file.

If you run into any issues or would like to add anything to the guide that you believe I have missed, please don't be afraid to reach out!