Inscryption: How to Customize Decks (Editing Saves)

This is a quick guide to editing the cards in your deck in order to make the early part of the game easier. You can also use it to customize your deck for fun.

There are unmarked spoilers from this point on! Read at your own risk

Disclaimer: I recommend doing this only at the very beginning of the game (right after the “Another Challenger, it has been ages…” battle in the cabin), because once your cards acquire added sigils and buffs then changing the order of the cards in your deck list could cause unusual problems. Editing other parts of the save file could cause something weird to happen or possibly crash the game. If you’ve already won the game, editing the game might reset your progress. This works for me when running on Win10 and v1.08 of Inscryption. Finally, make a backup copy of the save file before you do anything! Seriously.

If you’ve won the game already, then you can go back to the beginning at any time. Otherwise you can just lose card battles until you get sent to the opening card battle. Finish that battle, then the game will save. This will give you a clean file to edit. If you’re not sure you want to do this, then make a backup copy of your current save file before you go back to the start. This way you can always replace the current save with one where you had more progress. Either way, make a backup of the save file before you edit it.

Go to the directory where your Inscription save files area. If you installed to your C-drive it’s probably:

If you have played previously, “SaveFile.gwsave” and “SaveFile-Backup.gwsave” will be here. If there are no files of this name in the directory, then when you continue your game it will make a “SaveFile.gwsave” file.

First make a backup of the “SaveFile.gwsave” file.

Open it with your favorite text editor. In Windows right-click it and select “open with…” to use a text editor like Notepad. You can check the box so that Windows always uses Notepad. (if you do alot of experimenting this will make things much easier)

Once the save file is opened, search for “playerDeck” (with most windows programs you can open the find window with Ctrl+F). The first occurrence should appear a few lines under “currentRun”, be sure that you are going to edit the current deck.

After the “$rcontent” tag you should recognize the names of various cards below it, like “Wolf”, “Stoat_Talking”, etc. Add a comma at the end of the last item, and at the end add the cards:
“Ouroboros”,
“Geck”,
“FieldMouse”

You can add whichever you want, and I’d encourage you to experiment, but these are a good start. If you want my reasoning it’s in the next section.

IMPORTANT: Go to the line that starts with “$rlength”: and has a number at the end. This is the number of cards in your deck. After you are done adding (or removing) cards, make sure this number is the number of cards in your deck.

Finally save the file. If you set the “.gwsave” file extension to always open with Notepad, then you can just save and exit. Otherwise with Notepad you need to “Save As…” and then change the file type pull-down to “All Files” and be sure you type out the full filename with the extension: “SaveFile.gwsave”

Once you click “Continue your journey” in the main menu, it will load your deck.

If you want to start with a boosted deck, this is a good start. Every chance you get, you should try to play the Ouroboros and then sacrifice it to return it to your hand, even if it means prolonging a game that you are obviously going to win. The Geck and Field Mouse make a good combination when you reach the sacrifice stones so that you can but the Field Mouse’s sigil onto the Geck. You have a zero cost creature that makes a copy of itself every time it hits the board. So every space on the board will have, at the very least, eternally renewing roadblocks that can do a total of 4 damage a turn. For added fun you can pump the Geck’s attack value each time you reach a campfire.

Good luck and enjoy! I hope this helps you get through the first parts of the game. There are more sections (spoilers!) to this guide including a card list (this gives the correct names for the cards), some fun card combos to try, and a set of pro tips. There is also a section just for the people who finished the game. If you haven’t finished the game yet, pay no attention to the spoiler text below.

everything you know is a lie