Pokered Save Editor 2: recovering a corrupted working tree
A bulk rename truncated dozens of files on disk. Here's how the project was rebuilt and why the fix is a permanent rule.
The 2026 revival of Pokered Save Editor 2 — the Qt 6 / C++ rewrite of the original save editor — began with a setback worth recording, because the recovery from it shaped a standing rule for the project.
What happened
A bulk rename run over the editor’s working copy silently truncated 55 source files and 8 notes on disk. The command looked harmless:
# Ran over the working mount — silent partial writes under load
sed -i 's/OldText/NewText/g' projects/**/*.cpp
The tooling underneath was doing partial writes under load, and it had also been
reporting some reads as truncated when they were intact. Worse, the damage had
already been committed, so the latest commit was not a usable restore point — git
checkout would only restore the broken files.
Recovering from transcripts
The tree was reconstructed from prior working-session transcripts, which record every file read and write in full. Most of the ~45 affected source files came back exactly; a handful of large files were rebuilt by replaying their recorded edit history onto a known-good 2020 baseline, then validated line by line against the most recent reads.
The end state was verified mechanically rather than trusted:
$ verify
380 source files
0 truncated
0 missing Apache-2.0 headers
0 leftover corruption markers
After that, the recovered tree was taken from “compiles” to “compiles, links, runs, and matches the previous build’s behaviour” by working through the residual defects one at a time.
The rule that came out of it
The lasting outcome is a hard rule, now in the contributor docs: never bulk-edit files with shell stream tools over this working mount — use real editors or verified writes, and check every write.
# Safe pattern: explicit UTF-8 (no BOM) write, then re-read + brace-balance check
[System.IO.File]::WriteAllText($path, $text, (New-Object System.Text.UTF8Encoding $false))
Save-data fidelity is the whole point of this editor, so the same caution that
protects a player’s save file now protects the source that edits it. Alongside the
recovery, a project-wide documentation pass kicked off, with the shared common layer
fully doc-commented as the style reference for the rest of the codebase.