Hard Love Darkest Desire: Save Editing (Items, Exp and Skills, etc)

Your save game data should be located in the “steamapps\common\Hard Love – Darkest Desire” directory. To easily find this, go to your game library, right-click “Hard Love – Darkest Desire” and select the “open the installation location” option. In this directory you will see the `save` folder, containing your save files. It will look something like this…

“`
config.rmmzsave
file0.rmmzsave
file1.rmmzsave
file2.rmmzsave
file3.rmmzsave
global.rmmzsave
“`

The `file0.rmmzsave` is your autosave, with `file1.rmmzsave` and so forth are the manual saves you created when using that alter icon in your purse.

This is an RPGMaker game and so you need an RPGMaker save editor; I used the following tool, which allows you to edit your saves online without downloading any software.

http://www.save-editor.com/tools/rpg_tkool_mz_save.html

All you need to do is upload your save file, the `.rmmzsave` file. You must make sure to _not_ use the Save Editor because it will result in save file corruption, where you will get a ‘Can not load file: img/pictures/Nova.png’ error, you instead have to select the File Decoder (converts .rmmzsave to .json), and when you are finished, use the File Encoder (converts .json to .rmmzsave).

Open that .json file in your favorite text editing program, i.e. Notepad.

Increasing your level:

Find the following…

“””
“_exp”:{
“4”:517
},
“””

Change the above value to whatever you want; i.e. if you want to give yourself 10000 EXP, change it to

“””
“_exp”:{
“4”:10000
},
“””

Your character will have full EXP but will not level up until you trigger an EXP gain from interacting with something in your world environment. So you need to, for example, kill one of the Mowa to get some small EXP for you to level up.

Warning! If you increase your level before fighting Sally, this will break the game as it is impossible to lose at a high level and the script breaks and the game may softlock.

You can undo the level up by changing the “_level” field to 1 and then adjusting the EXP similar to above down to a lower value.

Adding Items (i.e. Memories)

If you do not want to slug through the game, you can do the following to save you a bunch of time:

Under “_items” add the following…

“””
“403”:1,
“412”:1,
“423”:1,
“443”:1,
“452”:1,
“463”:1,
“472”:1,
“483”:1,
“503”:1,
“512”:1,
“523”:1,
“532”:1,
“”””

Then you can open your inventory and just activate those memories and parts of the game. You will be missing out a bit on the story, but if you are only sticking around for the NSFW scenes, you’ll likely want to skip straight to this anyway. You need to finish Chapter/Act 1 first to be able to access these memories anyway.

Check the data/ folder to determine the ids for each of the Items, Skills, etc., but beware of any game-breaking bugs.