I just don't git it sometimes.

[Mindless Automaton]

What is the best way to keep updating with the changes to UOX3 but also keep stuff like community spawn, worldfiles, custom js in place?.

Thanks!

[Xuri]

First of all - always backup your existing UOX3 folder before updating to newer versions.

Secondly, assuming you're using git to grab the latest changes, I would suggest setting up and maintaining a separate UOX3 folder outside the local git repo, and keep the repo folder itself unchanged so you can always just do a git pull without worrying about overwriting anything.

Then, whenever you have pulled down any new changes, use a diff'ing tool to compare your custom UOX3 setup with the git-updated one (can also be used to compare changes between downloaded all-in-one packages and existing UOX3 setup) and merge any differences into your custom setup. For Windows, I've been using WinMerge for this purpose for over a decade. It highlights any differences between files in two folders and allows one to easily copy those differences between the files if wanted. I'm not sure what are equivalent tools on Linux/macOS, but I'm sure there are!

Another tip would be to always make sure you keep any custom DFN and JS stuff in separate files/subfolders (js/custom, dfndata/items/custom, dfndata/npc/custom, etc) when possible, to make it easier to compare the files and/or back up your custom data. For some files this might not be possible - like the jse_fileassociations.scp, but for those cases I suggest trying to keep the custom and default stuff separated in the file itself, either by position in the file, by using custom ID ranges, or both.

[Mindless Automaton]

Secondly, assuming you're using git to grab the latest changes, I would suggest setting up and maintaining a separate UOX3 folder outside the local git repo, and keep the repo folder itself unchanged so you can always just do a git pull without worrying about overwriting anything.

Thanks, I will start doing this. Otherwise GitHub Desktop keeps yelling at me about merging and all those things.