How to Fix Ink Story Choices Not Persisting Across a Save and Load

If loading a save resets your Ink narrative to the start, you saved game data but not Ink's own state. Serializing the Ink state fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Save the Ink state json

When writing your save, call story.state.ToJson() and store that string. It captures visited knots, variable values, and the current pointer.

2. Load before continuing

On load, create the Story from the compiled json, then call story.state.LoadJson(savedString) before you call Continue() so it resumes exactly where the player left off.

3. Keep the same compiled story

Restore against the same compiled .ink.json version used when saving; structural edits to the story can invalidate an old state, so version your story asset alongside saves.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.