Part 12: Endless Mode, third run

A third attempt at Endless Mode, with Goblins and Lava Golems and Mages, oh my! As we're getting closer to the end of the game and the videos get longer, I'm going to be cutting out more fights where nothing of note happens rather than just doing speedups.

Part 12: Endless mode, third run (YouTube)

Hoarder's Desire is fun to play around with if you can get past the initial hump. I wasn't doing badly, aside from being resource-constrained; even the curses were not my end. By the later floors in this run, enemies were dying noticeably faster to the axe and the mace. It's just that the mace was slow enough to be an impediment again. Seriously, the allure of high damage is hard to resist.

My understanding of the combat queue deepens a bit, since a lot of Ratmen were able to leap towards me in short succession. Special attacks seem to be their own special deal; maybe the game only expects so many special attacks to be on the field at once.

Metal Ore came first this time! …and Holy Forge did not appear. But the Metal Ore did allow us to pay our way past a DLC encounter gate.

Although I skipped past many older encounters, it's good to remember that quite a few encounters will penalize you for trying to ignore them. In Story Mode you can try to keep them out of your deck, but Endless Mode doesn't have that luxury. Plus, you'll almost certainly have some annoying cards no matter what run you're in. The failures are good for this LP, not necessarily for your runs.

And you know, I might have survived that final encounter had I done some savescumming. Which brings me to a note about…

The Save System

I debated whether I should add this section or not, but I had so much difficulty when searching for this information, I hope someone else will benefit.

Hand of Fate has an automatic save system which saves to a file named player.profile. If you're not in an active run, the game will save your current equipment and encounter decks, and your currently selected Fate. Reloading the game brings you to the start screen. If you are in a run, the game will save your progress right when an encounter is finished, or when you move back to a visited card. Within a run, all card decks will also stay in the same order, and reloading an old save file will not change the layout of further floors. A few dungeons such as Maze of Traps won't be the same because they get generated when the encounter loads (we'll see that later in the LP).

If you start an encounter and don't like the way it's going, the game might not let you quit from the menu, but you could force-quit and reload the game if you really want to go that route. However, you could just make copies of the save file and quit/restore them as needed. If you're going to do that, you need to know a quirk of the save system with regard to Steam: there are two save file locations!

1. The official location, in a folder like "[user files]/unity3d/Defiant Development/Hand of Fate"
   
2. The Steam Cloud sync folder, which looks like "Steam/userdata/[user id]/266510/remote/HandOfFate/"
   

If you're playing the Steam version, both locations might contain the player.profile file, and both will update it… but the game might only read from the Cloud Sync location, even if Cloud Sync is turned off. This tripped me up early in the LP until a post about an unrelated game clued me in on the problem.

Like with any other game, playing around with save files might make the game less enjoyable; the challenge is part of the fun! I think that as a first-time player, you should give the game a fair shot and play the game without resorting to messing with save files. Part of the point is the failure of death. However, I think it is good to know this information, and I like showing you a bit about how the game does what it does.