As you will know if you've gotten this far, when you start the Small County application, you are greeted with a Welcome screen. When you click Get started! on that screen, you will see:
Every time you start a new exercise, a new rendition of the Small County subsurface is created and you start the exploration process from the beginning, drilling your first well. Alternatively, if you have already run the program and want to continue with the exercise you were working on before, you can choose the Continue from saved exercise option. If you click Next with the Start new exercise option selected, you will be prompted to enter a name for your exploration company and the location and name for the file where the exercise data will be saved:
You may enter any name you please for your exploration company. This name will be used as part of the name for each well you drill. Use the Browse... button to navigate to the folder where you want to save the exercise data file. The default file name is "exercise1.sccounty". You may enter another name in place of "exercise1", but you should keep the ".sccounty" extension, since this is how the software identifies exercise data files. If you are continuing from a saved exercise instead, then you will be prompted to navigate to and open the saved data file for that exercise.
If you are starting a new exercise, then once you click Finish on the dialog box shown above, you will see a progress bar telling you that the software is initializing the county subsurface and saving the exercise state. Initializing the county subsurface means that the software is generating the subsurface structure that you will be exploring. This information ("state") is then saved to the exercise data file that you specified above. As you work through the exercise, information about the wells you drill will also be added to the exercise data file, so that you can open that data file later and continue an exercise where you left off.
After the software has created the county structure and saved the data, you will be transferred to the County Overview window to commence exploration.