Does reinstalling a game result in the deletion of your character

[Htick]

After reinstalling the game, I find myself with no characters, forcing me to create a new one. Is there any way to recover my lost character?

[Zalas]

I have not played since the game came out, re-installed on a new PC today, and also have no character/mission, as well as none of my pre-order gear

[Aggrodite]

They had a hard reset, everyone lost their progress :/

[Ronwaldo]

They didn't have a "hard" reset - they released an update some many months ago that moved your save file from their servers to a local save. If you didn't fire up the game within a certain time of that patch release you lost everything. Otherwise, your cloud save was migrated to your PC.

You can likely google where this save file lives (somewhere in %AppData%) and make a backup before doing any kind of reinstall and keep everything.

Here it is: %localappdata% -> Icarus -> Saved

[william_es]

Originally posted by Htick:

After reinstalling the game, I find myself with no characters, forcing me to create a new one. Is there any way to recover my lost character?

When was the last time you played?

As ronwaldo said, the devs stopped trying to host player information on their servers, and moved all of that to player's local machines.

If I remember right, this started in december 2022?? and continued well into march 2023. All you had to do was migrate the data, and you were set. Even after that, there was a way to load a certain depot, and it would contain all your character information. It was a bit clunky, but worked for many people for months.

After that though, if you didn't migrate the data to your own computer, it was lost. Before this event, nothing about your character was stored on your local computer.

But... silver lining here is that the information _is_ stored on computers now. So you can go into those files, and edit information to give yourself back currency. Re buy whatever gear your old character had.

Also, there have been really significant changes to whole game play loop over the years, so just restarting a whole new character from scratch will progress MUCH faster then old characters could. I missed out on the data migration and lost my old character completely.

I just started a new one. On my 3rd mission with a completely new character, I was already mining an exotics deposit. Got a 190+ exotics. Ended my 3rd mission with a level 27 character. Converted those exotics into ren at 1 to 5 ration. Had hundreds and hundreds of credits. Started my 4th mission with a ton of workshop gear. And it just kept going like that. My new character now has more gear then my old character ever had.

[Darkside99x]

Originally posted by william_es:

Originally posted by Htick:

After reinstalling the game, I find myself with no characters, forcing me to create a new one. Is there any way to recover my lost character?

When was the last time you played?

As ronwaldo said, the devs stopped trying to host player information on their servers, and moved all of that to player's local machines.

If I remember right, this started in december 2022?? and continued well into march 2023. All you had to do was migrate the data, and you were set. Even after that, there was a way to load a certain depot, and it would contain all your character information. It was a bit clunky, but worked for many people for months.

After that though, if you didn't migrate the data to your own computer, it was lost. Before this event, nothing about your character was stored on your local computer.

But... silver lining here is that the information _is_ stored on computers now. So you can go into those files, and edit information to give yourself back currency. Re buy whatever gear your old character had.

Also, there have been really significant changes to whole game play loop over the years, so just restarting a whole new character from scratch will progress MUCH faster then old characters could. I missed out on the data migration and lost my old character completely.

I just started a new one. On my 3rd mission with a completely new character, I was already mining an exotics deposit. Got a 190+ exotics. Ended my 3rd mission with a level 27 character. Converted those exotics into ren at 1 to 5 ration. Had hundreds and hundreds of credits. Started my 4th mission with a ton of workshop gear. And it just kept going like that. My new character now has more gear then my old character ever had.

Well that explains it at least, my last time playing was November 22 after they switched to local host and added openworld. Reinstalled a few days ago to basically to a completely unplayed game.

Figured they had moved the saves to local by that point.

[Ronwaldo]

Originally posted by Darkside99x:

Originally posted by william_es:

When was the last time you played?

As ronwaldo said, the devs stopped trying to host player information on their servers, and moved all of that to player's local machines.

If I remember right, this started in december 2022?? and continued well into march 2023. All you had to do was migrate the data, and you were set. Even after that, there was a way to load a certain depot, and it would contain all your character information. It was a bit clunky, but worked for many people for months.

After that though, if you didn't migrate the data to your own computer, it was lost. Before this event, nothing about your character was stored on your local computer.

But... silver lining here is that the information _is_ stored on computers now. So you can go into those files, and edit information to give yourself back currency. Re buy whatever gear your old character had.

Also, there have been really significant changes to whole game play loop over the years, so just restarting a whole new character from scratch will progress MUCH faster then old characters could. I missed out on the data migration and lost my old character completely.

I just started a new one. On my 3rd mission with a completely new character, I was already mining an exotics deposit. Got a 190+ exotics. Ended my 3rd mission with a level 27 character. Converted those exotics into ren at 1 to 5 ration. Had hundreds and hundreds of credits. Started my 4th mission with a ton of workshop gear. And it just kept going like that. My new character now has more gear then my old character ever had.

Well that explains it at least, my last time playing was November 22 after they switched to local host and added openworld. Reinstalled a few days ago to basically to a completely unplayed game.

Figured they had moved the saves to local by that point.

If you can resist the urge to straight up cheat and have an idea of what you had you can easily edit your save file to try and get back some of the progress you had. Plenty of how-to's out on the intertubes.