Entire Character and Farm Deleted

[Marpeck]

I was loading Paleo Pines using a controller, and quickly double clicked the A button to click continue and open the profile. Instead, it opened new game and clicked the overwrite button. All my progress and my entire game gone in literally 1 second. Is there any way to get my old game back, or is it gone forever?

[Dragonkin56]

Oh my! I am very sorry this has happened to you <3
I imagine there is not, but to be sure I will check within the discord for you!

[Marpeck]

Originally posted by Dragonkin56:

Oh my! I am very sorry this has happened to you <3
I imagine there is not, but to be sure I will check within the discord for you!

Thank you so much, to give you an idea of how devastating this is, I have 88 hours put into this farm and have completed the main story line and was working on maxing out my friendship with all the characters. I had multiple rare and ultra rare dinos. I'm absolutely devastated, so any help would be very much appreciated.

[Dragonkin56]

Originally posted by Marpeck:

Originally posted by Dragonkin56:

Oh my! I am very sorry this has happened to you <3
I imagine there is not, but to be sure I will check within the discord for you!

Thank you so much, to give you an idea of how devastating this is, I have 88 hours put into this farm and have completed the main story line and was working on maxing out my friendship with all the characters. I had multiple rare and ultra rare dinos. I'm absolutely devastated, so any help would be very much appreciated.

Of course!
Not a response from a dev yet (they are out of office at the moment), but someone had said that folks have been able to retrieve their data from the Steam cloud before! It may be worth a try <3

[Marpeck]

Originally posted by Dragonkin56:

Originally posted by Marpeck:

Thank you so much, to give you an idea of how devastating this is, I have 88 hours put into this farm and have completed the main story line and was working on maxing out my friendship with all the characters. I had multiple rare and ultra rare dinos. I'm absolutely devastated, so any help would be very much appreciated.

Of course!
Not a response from a dev yet (they are out of office at the moment), but someone had said that folks have been able to retrieve their data from the Steam cloud before! It may be worth a try <3

I did try that before posting here, the only thing in the Steam cloud was the New Game, all the old saves were gone.

[Dragonkin56]

Originally posted by Marpeck:

Originally posted by Dragonkin56:

Of course!
Not a response from a dev yet (they are out of office at the moment), but someone had said that folks have been able to retrieve their data from the Steam cloud before! It may be worth a try <3

I did try that before posting here, the only thing in the Steam cloud was the New Game, all the old saves were gone.

Ah, dang it. HAve you tried opening the Load menu and seeing if any autosaves exist there for the old save?

[Marpeck]

Originally posted by Dragonkin56:

Originally posted by Marpeck:

I did try that before posting here, the only thing in the Steam cloud was the New Game, all the old saves were gone.

Ah, dang it. HAve you tried opening the Load menu and seeing if any autosaves exist there for the old save?

Yup, that was the first thing I tried, but because the New Game defaults to overwriting the first profile slot instead of using one of the empty slots, when I created the new game, it deleted that character, so they aren't available to load, and when I clicked on the profile of the character I overwrote it with, only the new game saves were there. I ended up joining the discord and suggesting that the New Game and Load buttons be swapped on the menu, or that the New Game default to a new profile instead of overwriting the first profile slot. This was 100% my fault for not paying attention and relying on muscle memory, but in my opinion it was way too easy to make this mistake, especially since it's the exact same button to complete all the steps of overwriting a game. Even though it was kinda soul crushing to lose all the work and my dinos, at least for the new game, I now know a lot more and can set my farm up in a smart way the first time, and maybe I'll have better ultra rare spawn luck in the new game.

[Dragonkin56]

Originally posted by Marpeck:

Originally posted by Dragonkin56:

Ah, dang it. HAve you tried opening the Load menu and seeing if any autosaves exist there for the old save?

Yup, that was the first thing I tried, but because the New Game defaults to overwriting the first profile slot instead of using one of the empty slots, when I created the new game, it deleted that character, so they aren't available to load, and when I clicked on the profile of the character I overwrote it with, only the new game saves were there. I ended up joining the discord and suggesting that the New Game and Load buttons be swapped on the menu, or that the New Game default to a new profile instead of overwriting the first profile slot. This was 100% my fault for not paying attention and relying on muscle memory, but in my opinion it was way too easy to make this mistake, especially since it's the exact same button to complete all the steps of overwriting a game. Even though it was kinda soul crushing to lose all the work and my dinos, at least for the new game, I now know a lot more and can set my farm up in a smart way the first time, and maybe I'll have better ultra rare spawn luck in the new game.

Ahhh, I see. I 100% agree that there should be extra warning for creating a new save, possibly something explaining that it will overwrite your current one. Again, I am incredibly sorry about this!!! It should be more difficult to accidentally overwrite your saves and I hope there are measures implemented to prevent this in the future - we apologize! When the devs come back to office I will be sure to let them know that some folks have had this issue and that we would like if preventative measures were added, on top of your suggestion <3

[Marpeck]

Originally posted by Dragonkin56:

Originally posted by Marpeck:

Yup, that was the first thing I tried, but because the New Game defaults to overwriting the first profile slot instead of using one of the empty slots, when I created the new game, it deleted that character, so they aren't available to load, and when I clicked on the profile of the character I overwrote it with, only the new game saves were there. I ended up joining the discord and suggesting that the New Game and Load buttons be swapped on the menu, or that the New Game default to a new profile instead of overwriting the first profile slot. This was 100% my fault for not paying attention and relying on muscle memory, but in my opinion it was way too easy to make this mistake, especially since it's the exact same button to complete all the steps of overwriting a game. Even though it was kinda soul crushing to lose all the work and my dinos, at least for the new game, I now know a lot more and can set my farm up in a smart way the first time, and maybe I'll have better ultra rare spawn luck in the new game.

Ahhh, I see. I 100% agree that there should be extra warning for creating a new save, possibly something explaining that it will overwrite your current one. Again, I am incredibly sorry about this!!! It should be more difficult to accidentally overwrite your saves and I hope there are measures implemented to prevent this in the future - we apologize! When the devs come back to office I will be sure to let them know that some folks have had this issue and that we would like if preventative measures were added, on top of your suggestion <3

There is an overwrite warning, however clicking New Game, Profile, and Confirm Overwrite are all the same button, so if you press it really fast, it's already too late before you realize what they've done. And it's the same button you press for Continue and loading your current profile, so if you bump your direction pad on your controller while opening the game, you could easily bump over to New Game instead of continue. It's mainly my fault, but I hope they consider making it a little more me-proof, lol

Thanks for all your help!!!

[Dragonkin56]

Originally posted by Marpeck:

Originally posted by Dragonkin56:

Ahhh, I see. I 100% agree that there should be extra warning for creating a new save, possibly something explaining that it will overwrite your current one. Again, I am incredibly sorry about this!!! It should be more difficult to accidentally overwrite your saves and I hope there are measures implemented to prevent this in the future - we apologize! When the devs come back to office I will be sure to let them know that some folks have had this issue and that we would like if preventative measures were added, on top of your suggestion <3

There is an overwrite warning, however clicking New Game, Profile, and Confirm Overwrite are all the same button, so if you press it really fast, it's already too late before you realize what they've done. And it's the same button you press for Continue and loading your current profile, so if you bump your direction pad on your controller while opening the game, you could easily bump over to New Game instead of continue. It's mainly my fault, but I hope they consider making it a little more me-proof, lol

Thanks for all your help!!!

Oop, I hadn't noticed that! I play on PC so those issues are slightly lesser on that platform - your concerns are still valid though of course! More warning/prevention is definitely in order, in my opinion. I sincerely hope they consider adding this <3
Of course, no problem at all! Thank YOU ^^

[Marpeck]

Originally posted by Dragonkin56:

Originally posted by Marpeck:

There is an overwrite warning, however clicking New Game, Profile, and Confirm Overwrite are all the same button, so if you press it really fast, it's already too late before you realize what they've done. And it's the same button you press for Continue and loading your current profile, so if you bump your direction pad on your controller while opening the game, you could easily bump over to New Game instead of continue. It's mainly my fault, but I hope they consider making it a little more me-proof, lol

Thanks for all your help!!!

Oop, I hadn't noticed that! I play on PC so those issues are slightly lesser on that platform - your concerns are still valid though of course! More warning/prevention is definitely in order, in my opinion. I sincerely hope they consider adding this <3
Of course, no problem at all! Thank YOU ^^

I actually play on PC too, I'm one of those heathens who uses a controller on PC. IDK if you noticed, but I'm kinda chaotic. It causes issues like this. If there's a way for me to break a game or find a weird issue, I accidentally will.

[AEon]

TL;DR: If you are playing the Steam version on PC, and your game is NOT installed on an SSD (i.e. on a HDD) there might be a way to restore the "deleted save file".

Apparently, the game saves end up in one file (I think even when there are up to 4 profiles). Now depending on how the game actually saves into that file. E.g. it might rename the current "save archive file", write a completely new one onto "disk", to only then delete the renamed file... there might be hope that the renamed but deleted file is still on the "disk", just no longer visible.

Now there are free tools out there that let you search for such "deleted" files under Windows. If you would like to try this out... I can look into the matter some more, i.e. where exactly to look in the file system, what free software to use, and how to use it.

To be brief: I use Recuva for that, and it had been working wonderfully... just one downside, my games are on SSDs, and I have never been able to recover deleted file intact on an SSD.

[Marpeck]

Originally posted by AEon:

TL;DR: If you are playing the Steam version on PC, and your game is NOT installed on an SSD (i.e. on a HDD) there might be a way to restore the "deleted save file".

Apparently, the game saves end up in one file (I think even when there are up to 4 profiles). Now depending on how the game actually saves into that file. E.g. it might rename the current "save archive file", write a completely new one onto "disk", to only then delete the renamed file... there might be hope that the renamed but deleted file is still on the "disk", just no longer visible.

Now there are free tools out there that let you search for such "deleted" files under Windows. If you would like to try this out... I can look into the matter some more, i.e. where exactly to look in the file system, what free software to use, and how to use it.

To be brief: I use Recuva for that, and it had been working wonderfully... just one downside, my games are on SSDs, and I have never been able to recover deleted file intact on an SSD.

Thanks for the info, I did quite a bit of troubleshooting to try to find and recover any files, both on my PC and in Steam Cloud, however I was unsuccessful. After a couple cups of hot chocolate and some homemade cookies, I'm coming to terms with it and starting to plan out a new farm. But this time I'll be WAY more careful when loading in!

[AEon]

Just a thought: Personally - even though I do have a Xbox controlled and use it for racing games - I would recommend using a mouse and keyboard with this game. Especially later, when experimenting with recipes... a mouse is so much more nimble.