Kittens Game Save Editor by patsy

For Kittens Game by bloodrizer

Thanks to Guest93 for some updates, and thanks to countless people for the suggestions and bug reports.

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About this fork

I did not write this editor. patsy did.

Every part of the save editor itself — the design, the architecture, and effectively all of the code in this repository — is patsy's original work, released by them under the MIT License. The original repository lives at bitbucket.org/coderpatsy/kgsaveedit and its last update was in July 2023. The full commit history, with patsy's original authorship intact, has been preserved here rather than squashed or re-committed.

This fork exists for one reason: the upstream project appears to be no longer maintained, and the editor has fallen behind current Kittens Game versions. It is not a rewrite, a rebrand, or a claim of ownership.

On how this fork is maintained

I am maintaining this fork using LLM tooling to bring the editor up to date with current Kittens Game versions and to keep it working going forward. That is the honest description of the process, and it is stated up front so nobody is misled about it:

• Changes here are largely produced with AI assistance rather than hand-written.
• All original credit for the editor belongs to patsy, not to me and not to any model.
• Bugs introduced after the fork point are mine, not patsy's. Please report them here and not to patsy or upstream.

If patsy ever resumes upstream development, or objects to this fork existing, upstream takes precedence and this fork will defer to it.

Status

Currently targets Kittens Game version 1.5.0.3 (July 2026). Upstream left the editor at 1.4.9.0.r674 (July 2023); the content added across 1.4.9.4, 1.5.0.0, 1.5.0.1, 1.5.0.2 and 1.5.0.3 has since been ported in.

The save format itself is unchanged across that range — the game and the editor both use saveVersion: 15 — so saves from any of those versions load and round-trip.

The target version is declared in one place — the #gameVersionSpan element in editor.html — and is read at runtime into window.editorVersion, which also drives cache-busting for module and locale fetches.

Running it locally

The editor is entirely client-side: plain HTML, CSS, and ES5-era JavaScript loaded via <script> tags. There is no build step and no runtime dependencies to install. It does need to be served over HTTP rather than opened as a file:// URL, because it fetches its locale JSON over XHR.

npm install
npm start

That serves the repo on http://localhost:8080 and opens the editor. Any static file server works just as well if you would rather not use npm.

Dev mode

The save-diffing Dev tab is opt-in. It loads automatically on localhost / 127.0.0.1, or anywhere else by adding ?dev to the URL:

http://localhost:8080/editor.html?dev

Deployed copies therefore stay clean by default. (Upstream shipped the dev tooling hard-coded into editor.html, with a comment from patsy noting it was not meant to go live.)

Linting

npm run lint

The source files already carried /* global ... */ directives but no committed ESLint config, so one has been added in eslint.config.mjs to match how the code is actually written. Indentation rules are deliberately left to .editorconfig.

Tests

npm test

This boots the real editor in headless Chromium (Playwright) and checks that it loads, that every module and locale resolves, and that a save survives an export/import round-trip.

The reason it works this way: this codebase fails quietly. Modules are fetched with $.getScript and strings are resolved through $I, so a broken module or a missing translation key shows up as a console error and nothing else — the page still renders, lint still passes, and the diff still looks clean. The tests therefore treat any console.error, page error, or failed request during boot as a failure.

That matters most for the game-version work: changing hundreds of data entries is exactly the situation where a silent break is easy to ship.

First run needs the browser binary:

npx playwright install chromium

Credits

• patsy — created the save editor. All of it.
• Guest93 — updates to the original.
• bloodrizer — created Kittens Game itself.
• Countless people who sent patsy suggestions and bug reports.

License

MIT, unchanged from upstream — see license.txt. Copyright (c) 2016 patsy. The original copyright notice is retained in full, as the license requires.