Using symbolic links I got rid of that unpleasant saving problem. Basically, I turned my custom hero into a shortcut to my main hero. All progress between my main and custom hero is now shared. I did the same thing to my unlocked blacksmith formulas.
Somehow it doesn’t work for the shared stash.
Here’s how you do it:
Warning: the instructions below can ruin your save games if you do something wrong. To be safe, make a back-up of your whole save folder first.
You need to open notepad and copy+paste the code below. Later, you will need to turn it into a batch file, but first you must edit the path to your own save folders. Best is to use replace all (ctr+h) in notepad to make sure you don’t miss anything.
- USERNAME should be your username
- CHARACTERNAME should be the name of your vanilla game hero
- MODNAME should be the name of the mod that you are sharing your formulas with. The first time you play a mod a folder is made in the save folder, and MODNAME should be spelled the same. If you don’t want to share formulas you can forget about this one.
When you are done, click save as, and in the following screen click save as again, select all file types, and add .bat to the name of your file. Save and you now have your very own batch-file! Before you run it, you have to make sure that there is no custom hero with the same name as your main hero, because if the file already exists the code will not work. The same is true for your formulas so if you want this you have to remove or back up (which you already did, right?) the files formulas.gst and formulas.gst.bak. Remove them from Grim Dawn\save\modname and not from Grim Dawn\save (!).
Finally, right-click the batch-file and select run as administrator.
If you are successful, deleting either your main hero or your custom hero in-game will delete both. If you ever wish to get rid of these symbolic link shenanigans you must manually delete the two formulas in save\modname\ and your custom hero folder save\custom_charactername. Or you can use your back-up.
mklink /d c:\users\"USERNAME"\documents\"my games"\"grim dawn"\save\user\"_CHARACTERNAME" c:\users\"USERNAME"\documents\"my games"\"grim dawn"\save\main\"_CHARACTERNAME"
mklink c:\users\"USERNAME"\documents\"my games"\"grim dawn"\save\"MODNAME"\formulas.gst c:\users\"USERNAME"\documents\"my games"\"grim dawn"\save\formulas.gst
mklink c:\users\"USERNAME"\documents\"my games"\"grim dawn"\save\"MODNAME"\formulas.gst.bak c:\users\"USERNAME"\documents\"my games"\"grim dawn"\save\formulas.gst.bak