Best way to save custom stuff
 

me and my friend have a server, i want to add a bunch of custom NPC's and other things like that and he keeps complaining about having to dig through the SQL database and single out where our custom stuff is. i was wondering if you guys have a secret to saving the custom stuff you do so you can continue to update as updates come out without losing everything

There's no easy way of doing this. If you have a custom environment, you'll need to commit all the additions and modifications to an sql file that you would run after each db update. I'm current keeping all additions and modifications in an Excel spreadsheet (just use Navicat or Heidi to copy and paste each new record you create), one tab per modified table, and will eventually commit all this to an SQL file.