Before I even start, I implore anyone to share this post anywhere you can. Our voices as individuals are quiet, but if we’re able to collectively spotlight this topic, our voice as a community will be much louder. Please help to get our voice heard!
I’ve been keeping logs of most of my stories I go through and, as you might imagine, it’s devolved into a jumble of story tidbits interrupted by a completely different story. I’m hoping if we can gather enough drive from the community, that maybe Failbetter could implement some changes.
I feel It’d be nice to be able to organize journal entries in folders or by storyline. I love being able to go back and read through decisions I’ve made or stories I’ve lived through, but it feels like I have to do an investigation in order to find all the pieces I need.
Over time I’ve become less eclectic with my journaling and just focus one story at a time in order to maintain some linearity, but that doesn’t really solve the issue of all of the entries I’d made earlier. Some ability to reorganize entries would go a long way to make the journal a better way to log everything.
I’m not sure if this is a niche problem or desire, but in my opinion, it would be a very nice QoL feature to have organization options or folders. I’m aware of options such as keeping a word document or physically creating a journal, but ideally I’d like to be able to have all of my information accessible in-game.
Any and all suggestions anyone has are welcome! Hopefully we can use this thread as a pool of ideas/desires from the community for potential changes or improvements!
I’ve thought about this, too. My Ambition progress is jumbled with Exceptional Stories and random Opportunity Cards, all of which are great fun to read through when I’m bored waiting for actions to refresh or looking for writing inspo, but impractical when I’m trying to remember what exactly I’m doing. I Journal at least one thing every time I play because I adore the writing and that is stacking up very quickly.
This has been an issue for all the many years of the game’s existence. If you use the forum’s search function you’ll find threads from 10 years back and more asking for better journals.
There’s been a few tweaks along the way, but essentially journals haven’t changed.
But it’s only been very recently that the Profile page got a little update.
In that post it was said:
So, all this only talks about the profile page, but since that’s where the journal is, maybe some of these future updates will concern the journal as well.
In any case, it won’t hurt to drop an email to feedback@failbettergames.com to let them know your thoughts on this (the devs don’t read everything on the forums).
I very much agree. If I wanted to look at my first entry (which by the way is mudlarking), I would’ve had to scroll a good few times. And that’s just for someone who’s played four months. They really should implement some easy sort of organization, or at least make viewing records in the middle of your tale less agonizing.
I want to say I fully support updates to the journal to make it more manageable.
One proposal I have is to add a search button for entry titles at least. I have many times looked up on the wiki a storylet or result that I had played and realised I would have to scroll for dozens of minutes to find the full entry saved in my journal (but unavailable in its complete form on the wiki).
The search button coupled with the already-implemented show-entries-by-date function would also be helpful for finding entries related to stories that were played linearly.
