Help for owners of old colonies

[O6ygen Included]

I have an old save that I really like, but it was created when there were no story buildings, the developers suggested adding them through the sandbox, but this spoils the save with the sandbox status and the button next to the game speed

and make a rule for the hermit (if there is one, a new hermit will not appear on other asteroids)

Of course, there are problems with the new story buildings that are powered by neutronium, but at least without them

[asurendra]

All you need is mod that removes sandbox status

[Gurgel]

Yep. It would be a hack in any case, no way around that.

That said, I found that on each new colony I do something I have not done before. So while I habe > 10k cycle colonies, I usually do not visit them again except maybe to look something up. 

[gigamoi]

9 minutes ago, O6ygen Included said:

but this spoils the save with the sandbox status and the button next to the game speed

I believe that there are mods that undo that.

[O6ygen Included]

10 minutes ago, asurendra said:

All you need is mod that removes sandbox status

I understand that mods solve many problems, but I play exclusively the vanilla version and want to play it the way the developers intended. (I also don’t want to go to the map after updating the game and pray that it will start and the mods won’t crash)

[gigamoi]

58 minutes ago, O6ygen Included said:

I understand that mods solve many problems, but I play exclusively the vanilla version and want to play it the way the developers intended. (I also don’t want to go to the map after updating the game and pray that it will start and the mods won’t crash)

If it is the developers intent you worry about, they most likely "intended" to allow new content to be made available on old saves but didn't have the ressources to make it so that it happens automatically without fail. Deciding where to paste a story trait in an existing save, with player built structures and what not, is something that can hardly be automated. Heck, even worldgen fails because of it from time to time. The next best thing is to have a tool for some human to do it and the cheapest viable implementation of such a thing is the sandbox paste tool.

Regarding the mods, those mods do not alter the format of your save, merely the game's behaviour. You can disable them once you are done with them and keep things vanilla from there with no issue.