Finally Finishing The Trail

I have been playing The Trail for more than half a decade now. It’s one of those games I keep coming back to, again and again.

It has always made me feel calm. There’s some magic to walking from one camp to another, opening up the map to see how far I have come, picking up things on the way and reading the little descriptions written for every single item. No rush. No pressure. Just the trail.

The Coming Soon Board

22cans and Kongregate stopped working on the game after camp 450 in Blossom Hills. At the end of the trail there’s a board that says Coming Soon. It has been saying that for years. It never went away.

That wasn’t the only unfinished thing either. The pine logging area in the town’s Logging Field is locked behind another coming soon sign. The objectives list has things like find my perfect partner and raise a family that never tick, no matter what you do. You start noticing these after a while and you can’t unsee them.

The 30fps Problem

On the technical side, the game always lagged on Android. Didn’t matter if I played it on a budget phone or the latest and greatest flagship. It just felt sluggish.

Turns out, there was a hard cap of 30fps. On a phone with a 120Hz display, that’s a really bad experience. Scrolling the map, walking the trail, everything felt like it was stuck in mud.

Can I Fix It?

That was the question I started with. Nothing more ambitious than that.

I sat down with Claude and asked if we could take a look at the game’s APK and figure something out. It pulled the game apart, found that the game turns on a low power mode every single time it launches, and patched it out. The game ran at 120fps. Smoothly.

Once I saw that this was actually possible, I got excited. If we could fix the frame rate, what else was hiding in there? Were there developer switches? Items I never had? Things I could never get, because the game doesn’t run events anymore?

The Developer Switches

Turns out, the developers had left a bunch of switches in the game. The kind of stuff you’d use while building and testing a game, switched off before shipping it. The code that checks them is still in there though. Flip one on and the game behaves like a developer’s build.

Some of my favourites -

• UnlockFastTravelEverywhere — Exactly what it says. Every camp and every town on the map is open for fast travel. The map also shows every region at once instead of only the ones you have reached.
• DebugStaminaDrainOff — No more stamina. Walk as far as you want without stopping to eat.
• SkipGates — Walk straight through the gates on the trail. No tickets, no requirements.
• Debug_PermitMinigameWithoutTool — Chop trees and hunt without an axe or a slingshot.
• Debug_CanBuyAllFurniture — Every piece of furniture in the catalogue is up for grabs, whatever your level.
• Debug_CanUpgradeHouseNow — Upgrade your house without the furniture and supplies it normally asks for.

Then there was a whole debug window. Around 70 buttons. Learn every recipe, upgrade the house right now and a lot more. The code that opened it had been stripped out of the release build, so there was no way to bring it up. Claude found a way to wire a couple of those buttons into the game anyway. That’s how my home got to level 17 without me gathering a single plank.

My favourite find though was a switch named BuyPlotWithoutDBBecauseDimitriBrokeSomethingAndIsntAroundToFixIt. It lets you buy a plot in town without going through the server. I have no idea who Dimitri is, but I hope he fixed it. There’s also an IsDimitriMode that nothing in the game uses anymore. Whatever Dimitri mode was, it’s gone forever.

Developers being developers. I loved every bit of it.

The Nifty Little Things

It took us through a lot of nifty little things.

• The frame rate — 120fps, on a game that never went above 30 for me.
• Quest items — Those pesky quest items that need 90, 100, 120 of something you barely find on the trail. Quests now complete as soon as I pick them up, with the reward and everything. All 114 quests across the four professions are done.
• My home — Upgraded to level 17, the highest level the game has. The game now tells me “Larger houses coming soon!”. Of course it does.
• Recipes — Every recipe at its top crafting level.
• Outfits — I finally got to see every outfit in the game with its picture and stats, and got a few event outfits I had missed, like the Legendary Bunny set. I put the whole list up as The Trail Wardrobe if you want to browse it too.

Not everything worked though. We tried opening up the pine logging area. It unlocked, but the game slowed to a crawl and the trees dropped items that had no name. The developers had built the gates and the signs, but never what was supposed to be inside. We put it back.

We also found Uncle Rufus. If you have played the PC version, you meet him at the end of the trail. On mobile, he only exists as unused text sitting in the game files. “Rufus never completed his Almanac. He got lost out there, somewhere on the trail… or so they say.” That one stung a bit.

Closure

Somehow, all of this finally gave me a feeling of closure. The Trail was always a game I wanted to fully finish. I wanted to see every camp, every item and every little thing it had to offer. With Claude, that was finally possible, and I saw it.

I really wish 22cans and Kongregate had spent some more time developing it. The game helped me connect with real people who are passionate about this stuff on Discord. The people from my town were such amazing folks in the real world too.

There will always be this void now. I know there’s nothing else left to do in the game.

But I got to the end of the trail. And for once, I know exactly what’s out there.