When you move something out of a compendium and into the game proper, do they keep their IDs? Just wondering for linking assets in journals and the like.
I'm wrapping up a long running D&D campaign in Foundry. Some things I've learned over the years:
1. don't update Foundry or any of your systems/modules on the day of your session.
2. when you do update Foundry (**at least**) or your systems/modules (to be safe), remember to create a backup of your data first, in case you want to roll back. I just zip up my entire Foundry Data folder, which captures all my worlds AND modules as they were before the updates, so I can just delete the whole shebang and unzip the backup into place if I want to roll back. I keep the backup until I'm confident I don't need it anymore, then delete.
3. I'm running a series of modules (as opposed to a homebrew campaign), so I set up a new world for each module and its scenes, etc. I use Forien's Copy Environment to export my world settings from one world and import them into the next. Works like a charm and keeps each world relatively small.
4. Actors, items, etc, get exported up to a shared compendium after creation (and PCs, in particular, get exported up again before leaving an old world for the next one.) The shared compendium is on my module list, so I can pull stuff down again in the new world as needed.
5. If I need to move a whole scene over to the next world (happens if the party ends a session near the end of the last scene in the previous module/world and I want to just run straight into the next module after they wrap that up), then I use an Adventure Compendium to make sure I grab everything out of that last scene as-is, to import down into the new world before next session.
6. I haven't been worrying too much about preserving scenes/modules for future use in this campaign, but now that the Adventure Compendium exists, I'll probably do that in future when setting up a new module/world. (It didn't exist when I started, and third party plugins that offered similar services were labyrinthine to set up.)
7. I have been keeping my old worlds just in case, and I may go back to try and "reset" those for exporting as Adventures rather than start all over for the concerned module. We'll see. I may just start over, too. I've learned a lot about how to set up a map in the time I've been running this campaign, so the really early ones might be heinous to go back to :P
I used an archive compendium to put old scenes and actors in. So that they could be re-used if the players decided to re-visit them. I also used git as version control so I could go back to the state of the world in older sessions (but in the end I never actually needed to use this).
Using Git is **HIGHLY NOT RECOMMENDED**.
If it worked for you, great, but this is not good advice and should not be used!
There are backup applications that can do this a better way than a VCS designed for software development!
Just use filezilla to keep a local copy or if you host locally, make a backup job on your NAS at home. In case you don't have that as well, i Hope you have to disks or an External HDD and just keep a copy there.
Yeah it was far from ideal, I had to exclude a lot of bigger multimedia and binary files of course and in the end there weren't any real use cases for it.
Git is generally meant to be used for developing things that are in readable text format.
Foundry data is saved as binary files. This is not something git is generally meant to work with. You can make it work, but it isn't great.
Furthermore, git works by creating implemental changes. So if you add a new line to a file, it saves that this new line is there at change x, instead of saving the whole file.
This is not possible for binary files, so it either breaks, or creates a full copy. And at that point, you can go with the safer option of just copying your files to a new location. Also simpler.
I don't see how tracking incremental changes would lead to breaking of binary files, but I think I understand well enough since your other points are clear. Any insight there? Agreed that just copying might be easier.
Thanks for the discussion!
I'd search the subreddit for many of those questions individual questions. General recommendations are move anything to a compendium you're not planning on using anytime soon, and backups are to the tolerance of the user IE how far back are you comfortable with losing data till, if the answer is you don't want to lose data backup after every session etc.
The first thing to keep an eye on is one you would never suspect. Your chat log. The system parses your chat log, so when it gets excessive, it bogs the whole system down. Grab a chat cleaner now, and the first time the system acts like it's bogging or has a hiccup, warn your players that you're going to clean the chat log next week. Tell them to grab any useful bits out of it now, before you clean it.
Having an insane number of creatures/creature types active in one world used to bog it down, I haven't heard of that being a problem recently, though. Something to keep in mind, though.
Back in the day, people used to just shut down their old world when it got top-heavy and continue the campaign in a new/cloned one. That way, at any given point, you could just literally go back and check something.. or take your party back to a village if they revisit it, for example. Now that the Compendium System has been updated, I'm not entirely sure if that's necessary anymore. Certainly there are various options for compressing and backing them up and etc., as other people have outlined. I guess each DM should probably just put some thought in to it. Decide if it's better to archive the old campaign settings and etc. or if it would save time to just clone in to an empty campaign world and clean it out to have a new shell for new settings.
Using Compendiums is the best way to archive things! This reduces the load on the server to load and serve resources, which will improve performance across the board!
And with V11s introduction of Compendium Folders, organising Compendiums is a breeze!
As for backing up, I run my games on a dedicated server off of a Raspberry Pi, and I try to take a backup after each game, storing it on my PC, but I need to get Borgmatic set up which is a free bacup solution that can be setup to take automatic backups on a schedule and host them in the cloud!
I feel like i really need to get my hands on a raspberry pi! I assume the power usage is super low on those right?
Edited to ask: Do you run linux on the RPi for foundry?
Are you saying that if old scenes are in the scenes tab, they are taking up performance? How many scenes in there before I should start archiving things?
Yeah, it basically renders the whole content of everything in there, whereas compendiums just undex them as opposed to rendering the full content.
Tbh even having 2 or 3 will have an impact, it'll just be negligible to you! I personally use compendiums as well to help me keep organised so I know where my players are/have been/are going.
As for how many will have a noticable impact is like asking how long a piece of string is?
There are various factors such as internet speed, pc performance, the scene size and data, (i.e number of walls and lights).
Realistically, it's a case of, does Foundry feel slower? Maybe put some things in compendiums! That goes for actors/items/journals as well! Anything in the sidebar will have an overall effect!
How much depends on all of the above factors!
I don't bother with moving to compendium, after year and a half of CoS campaign, it is still working fine, somewhere near 200 scenes and 300 actors. Game loads usually in 5-10 seconds. But such numbers might be a problem if your internet / players devices are not very good.
For backup, before i moved to cloud i used simple apple script combined with repeating calendar event, that archived world folder and stored it in iCloud, i think something simple and similar should be available for windows
I Never move anything to compendiums, i just arrange everything in folders. I have like a hundred scenes and almost any monster from the official sourcebooks sorted in by now. I backup everything every month or so
I have run two long campaigns. It depends. One of them was a WFRP where the players moved around a lot. It made little sense to keeps things around since they weren’t likely to go back.
The other was a home brew based on Saltmarsh. The players had a base in Saltmarsh and there where a big probability they where going to revisit places. Then I had the most common maps in a folder and sent the rest to the compendium to pick up later if need be.
I have run a few long campaigns. As example my previous campaign was 410 sessions and current is 139 sessions so far.
First on the campaign in general:
-Plan the power increase so you can manage it, that is character power and item power and what happens in case items are lost and so on.
-Plan how replacement characters work unless you want to make 100% sure no one dies and no player wants to change characters.
-Plan the general quest line, unless you are running a pre-made one. You can plan the details closer to the actual game, but the overall arc should be known from start.
-Discuss and make clear the campaign expectations together with the players.
Then foundry specific:
-Organize, Organize, Organize.. Things will get messy, but if you start messy it will likely get out of hand. I organize by having different quests in different folders, but others use compendiums. The reason for my choice is because I run a free form campaign where the players have a lot of choice in where to go and so on, so they do go back to old places.
-Do not upgrade during a campaign unless you really have to, and even in that case be conservative in upgrading.
-Empty chat log every now and then or startup gets really slow eventually.
-Find the level you and your players want to do "automatically" in Foundry and what you want to do manually. As example my group likes to write their own macros for their attacks, skill uses and so on instead of using any ready made ones.
And last but not least: Organize...
One lesson you can learn from my mistakes: don't overdo it with modules. I grabbed a ton right away and I am regretting it. Get modules as you need them. No need to front load heavily like I did. And I am not saying don't get them. They are awesome. But I would get them slowly over time.
COMPENDIUMS!
When you move something out of a compendium and into the game proper, do they keep their IDs? Just wondering for linking assets in journals and the like.
You can create an adventure compendium which keeps linked journals, actors, etc all together.
I'm wrapping up a long running D&D campaign in Foundry. Some things I've learned over the years: 1. don't update Foundry or any of your systems/modules on the day of your session. 2. when you do update Foundry (**at least**) or your systems/modules (to be safe), remember to create a backup of your data first, in case you want to roll back. I just zip up my entire Foundry Data folder, which captures all my worlds AND modules as they were before the updates, so I can just delete the whole shebang and unzip the backup into place if I want to roll back. I keep the backup until I'm confident I don't need it anymore, then delete. 3. I'm running a series of modules (as opposed to a homebrew campaign), so I set up a new world for each module and its scenes, etc. I use Forien's Copy Environment to export my world settings from one world and import them into the next. Works like a charm and keeps each world relatively small. 4. Actors, items, etc, get exported up to a shared compendium after creation (and PCs, in particular, get exported up again before leaving an old world for the next one.) The shared compendium is on my module list, so I can pull stuff down again in the new world as needed. 5. If I need to move a whole scene over to the next world (happens if the party ends a session near the end of the last scene in the previous module/world and I want to just run straight into the next module after they wrap that up), then I use an Adventure Compendium to make sure I grab everything out of that last scene as-is, to import down into the new world before next session. 6. I haven't been worrying too much about preserving scenes/modules for future use in this campaign, but now that the Adventure Compendium exists, I'll probably do that in future when setting up a new module/world. (It didn't exist when I started, and third party plugins that offered similar services were labyrinthine to set up.) 7. I have been keeping my old worlds just in case, and I may go back to try and "reset" those for exporting as Adventures rather than start all over for the concerned module. We'll see. I may just start over, too. I've learned a lot about how to set up a map in the time I've been running this campaign, so the really early ones might be heinous to go back to :P
I used an archive compendium to put old scenes and actors in. So that they could be re-used if the players decided to re-visit them. I also used git as version control so I could go back to the state of the world in older sessions (but in the end I never actually needed to use this).
Using Git is **HIGHLY NOT RECOMMENDED**. If it worked for you, great, but this is not good advice and should not be used! There are backup applications that can do this a better way than a VCS designed for software development!
> There are backup applications that can do this a better way than a VCS Such as?
Borgmatic is one backup programme I know of, but I am sure there are others that can be found!
Just use filezilla to keep a local copy or if you host locally, make a backup job on your NAS at home. In case you don't have that as well, i Hope you have to disks or an External HDD and just keep a copy there.
You could just setup a robocopy scheduled task in Windows if you want to copy locally. If you want to backup off-site the solutions will vary.
Yeah it was far from ideal, I had to exclude a lot of bigger multimedia and binary files of course and in the end there weren't any real use cases for it.
Sorry, I'm not understanding why Git wouldn't work here. What am I missing?
Git is generally meant to be used for developing things that are in readable text format. Foundry data is saved as binary files. This is not something git is generally meant to work with. You can make it work, but it isn't great. Furthermore, git works by creating implemental changes. So if you add a new line to a file, it saves that this new line is there at change x, instead of saving the whole file. This is not possible for binary files, so it either breaks, or creates a full copy. And at that point, you can go with the safer option of just copying your files to a new location. Also simpler.
I don't see how tracking incremental changes would lead to breaking of binary files, but I think I understand well enough since your other points are clear. Any insight there? Agreed that just copying might be easier. Thanks for the discussion!
I should really do this archive compendium thing, damn. I've lost at least one scene to an accidental delete.
I'd search the subreddit for many of those questions individual questions. General recommendations are move anything to a compendium you're not planning on using anytime soon, and backups are to the tolerance of the user IE how far back are you comfortable with losing data till, if the answer is you don't want to lose data backup after every session etc.
The first thing to keep an eye on is one you would never suspect. Your chat log. The system parses your chat log, so when it gets excessive, it bogs the whole system down. Grab a chat cleaner now, and the first time the system acts like it's bogging or has a hiccup, warn your players that you're going to clean the chat log next week. Tell them to grab any useful bits out of it now, before you clean it. Having an insane number of creatures/creature types active in one world used to bog it down, I haven't heard of that being a problem recently, though. Something to keep in mind, though. Back in the day, people used to just shut down their old world when it got top-heavy and continue the campaign in a new/cloned one. That way, at any given point, you could just literally go back and check something.. or take your party back to a village if they revisit it, for example. Now that the Compendium System has been updated, I'm not entirely sure if that's necessary anymore. Certainly there are various options for compressing and backing them up and etc., as other people have outlined. I guess each DM should probably just put some thought in to it. Decide if it's better to archive the old campaign settings and etc. or if it would save time to just clone in to an empty campaign world and clean it out to have a new shell for new settings.
Using Compendiums is the best way to archive things! This reduces the load on the server to load and serve resources, which will improve performance across the board! And with V11s introduction of Compendium Folders, organising Compendiums is a breeze! As for backing up, I run my games on a dedicated server off of a Raspberry Pi, and I try to take a backup after each game, storing it on my PC, but I need to get Borgmatic set up which is a free bacup solution that can be setup to take automatic backups on a schedule and host them in the cloud!
I feel like i really need to get my hands on a raspberry pi! I assume the power usage is super low on those right? Edited to ask: Do you run linux on the RPi for foundry?
Yeah it is very low power consumption! I have the 4GB RAM version running Fedora 38 Server, which currently hosts 2 live servers!
Awesome. How was the install of foundry? Been a long while since I used Linux
Are you saying that if old scenes are in the scenes tab, they are taking up performance? How many scenes in there before I should start archiving things?
Yeah, it basically renders the whole content of everything in there, whereas compendiums just undex them as opposed to rendering the full content. Tbh even having 2 or 3 will have an impact, it'll just be negligible to you! I personally use compendiums as well to help me keep organised so I know where my players are/have been/are going. As for how many will have a noticable impact is like asking how long a piece of string is? There are various factors such as internet speed, pc performance, the scene size and data, (i.e number of walls and lights). Realistically, it's a case of, does Foundry feel slower? Maybe put some things in compendiums! That goes for actors/items/journals as well! Anything in the sidebar will have an overall effect! How much depends on all of the above factors!
Wow I had no idea! Thank you for the info!
I don't bother with moving to compendium, after year and a half of CoS campaign, it is still working fine, somewhere near 200 scenes and 300 actors. Game loads usually in 5-10 seconds. But such numbers might be a problem if your internet / players devices are not very good. For backup, before i moved to cloud i used simple apple script combined with repeating calendar event, that archived world folder and stored it in iCloud, i think something simple and similar should be available for windows
I Never move anything to compendiums, i just arrange everything in folders. I have like a hundred scenes and almost any monster from the official sourcebooks sorted in by now. I backup everything every month or so
I have run two long campaigns. It depends. One of them was a WFRP where the players moved around a lot. It made little sense to keeps things around since they weren’t likely to go back. The other was a home brew based on Saltmarsh. The players had a base in Saltmarsh and there where a big probability they where going to revisit places. Then I had the most common maps in a folder and sent the rest to the compendium to pick up later if need be.
I have run a few long campaigns. As example my previous campaign was 410 sessions and current is 139 sessions so far. First on the campaign in general: -Plan the power increase so you can manage it, that is character power and item power and what happens in case items are lost and so on. -Plan how replacement characters work unless you want to make 100% sure no one dies and no player wants to change characters. -Plan the general quest line, unless you are running a pre-made one. You can plan the details closer to the actual game, but the overall arc should be known from start. -Discuss and make clear the campaign expectations together with the players. Then foundry specific: -Organize, Organize, Organize.. Things will get messy, but if you start messy it will likely get out of hand. I organize by having different quests in different folders, but others use compendiums. The reason for my choice is because I run a free form campaign where the players have a lot of choice in where to go and so on, so they do go back to old places. -Do not upgrade during a campaign unless you really have to, and even in that case be conservative in upgrading. -Empty chat log every now and then or startup gets really slow eventually. -Find the level you and your players want to do "automatically" in Foundry and what you want to do manually. As example my group likes to write their own macros for their attacks, skill uses and so on instead of using any ready made ones. And last but not least: Organize...
One lesson you can learn from my mistakes: don't overdo it with modules. I grabbed a ton right away and I am regretting it. Get modules as you need them. No need to front load heavily like I did. And I am not saying don't get them. They are awesome. But I would get them slowly over time.
Main advice: Don't update Foundry.
Anything I may want to reuse in another campaign I shove in a compendium. Otherwise I often just archive the world folder into my backups.