Terrasavr+

I released a new major version of Terrasavr!

As some might recall, I’ve been on and off poking at it since late 2019, but it was only this year that I really pushed it to a usable state. What’s this all about:

The first version of Terrasavr released all the way back in December 2013. It was a different time - HTML5 support in web browsers was still lacking (especially on mobile); Adobe Flash was still alive and well (in fact, you often had to use Flash to get around HTML5 limitations); mobile versions of Terraria had only recently released and were showing no signs of ever letting people get to the save files easily.

But, more importantly, I didn’t plan for Terrasavr’s relative popularity. I didn’t plan for anything, really - Terrasavr started as a small experiment, just like a dozen or so other things I make every year. It uses a Flash-adjacent framework (OpenFL) because that’s what I used for work at the time. It acts like a game because I thought it’d be cool to simulate the way Terraria itself works. You can’t select text because it uses bitmap fonts (just like Terraria, yes).

Fast-forward almost a decade, Flash Player now largely exists in emulation and has been phased out of most browsers; HTML5 support has improved quite a bit; you can now export and import save files in mobile versions of Terraria. Even the screens have gotten bigger, with Terrasavr’s interface elements looking lonely in a corner of larger displays.

This new version of Terrasavr addresses most of these troubles:

• It’s a fairly normal page now.
• It works well on mobile.
• It loads way faster.
• The offline version is now just a ZIP with the files, not a whole-ass web browser tasked to download and cache the app.
• If you’ve got some of that screen real-estate, the app can now display in two or three columns, allowing quick access to all inventory sections at once.

There are also smaller improvements - user-created item libraries can now have nesting and sections (“standard library” uses the same mechanism), search is smarter, prefix picker shows you what is supported for the item, and numerous other things that I already forgot about.

Of course, there’s still work to do here - it’s yet to support localizations (oh no) and I still haven’t quite figured out how to make the app auto-update without increasing the server load. But we’ll get there.

As for the current version of Terrasvr, it’ll stick around until the new version is feature-complete, and then it’ll be retired to a separate directory while Terrasavr+ will become what you see by default. I have also updated it a little to load faster (or, rather, first the app loads, and then the multi-megabyte PNG file with all the item icons does) and export buffs in JSON format that’s compatible with Terrasavr+.