Restoring a Hardcore Save?

[QuestionableIntentions]

One of the worse things imaginable just occurred to me.
I windowed up with the intent of going directly back to the game.
However when I attempted to go back into Planet Craft my Keyboard and Mouse quit responding. Two minutes lately I got it responding again, but by then it was too late and my character must have already died and the save file was delete.

Anyone know of any workarounds? For example maybe an old cloudsave via steam?

This is absolutely preposterous if there is no way to restore your hardcore playthrough if you experienced technical difficulties. Even if someone simply messed up and wanted to pretend nothing ever happened that is on them if they want to play hardcore mode honestly or not since its a single player game...

In games similiar to this such as Raft, Hardcore mode is perma death, but it is still possible if you are dedicated to get the game save back. S**t happens and it is just a game.

[QuestionableIntentions]

BTW I was 37ish hours into this save!

[QuestionableIntentions]

Ok I figured out how to restore it myself...

in the following directory I noticed a Json file called back-up.json. After viewing the file in notepad++ I noticed a huge list of coordinates which made me curious. I then started a new game and immediately saved it. it created a file called Survival-2.json. So I experimented by exiting the game, making a copy of the backup.json file, then renaming the back-up Survival-1.json. From there was able to reload my old save losing maybe only 20 minutes of progress.

Navigate to
C:\Users\{User}\AppData\LocalLow\MijuGames\Planet Crafter\
Rename backup.json to Survival-1.json (or any number)
Start Game
Open lost save!

I might write myself a script to routinely back-up files from this directory in case this gets patched someday.

[twistedoldloony]

Lol. Well done! I lost a hardcore save the other day because I didn't hit the right button lol. Would have been nice to know about this then! Oh well! It would be nice if there was a built in "oh I only died because my computer did....." button when you die on hardcore but I guess that is a reason to not play hardcore! I guess you can play "intense" like it's hardcore but that little thing in your brain KNOWS that if you die you may lose all your stuff but you won't lose your life! I remember how differently I played Subnautica when I played it on hardcore. It was like a completely different game! It was extremely hard to search all those damn pieces of wrecks! Mainly because they were like freaking mazes!! I died so many times in normal playthroughs in those wrecks!

[QuestionableIntentions]

@twistedoldloony fun fact I discovered you can hack your game just by tweaking values in the json file. After studying the structure for a few minutes I quickly discovered which ids represented player inventory, and in game items are already called out by name. I knew items I Lost in my save so I just created a couple manual entries in the json to re-add the items I lost in my death :D

[carl.kenner]

Don't start or load another game.
Go to %appdata%\..\locallow\MijuGames\Planet Crafter\
Rename backup.json to restored.json (or any other name)
Restart Planet Crafter and load the game "restored".
You should have only lost about 7 minutes of progress from your game.

[Trakais]

Originally posted by carl.kenner:

Don't start or load another game.
Go to %appdata%\..\locallow\MijuGames\Planet Crafter\
Rename backup.json to restored.json (or any other name)
Restart Planet Crafter and load the game "restored".
You should have only lost about 7 minutes of progress from your game.

I guess the first thing to do is turn off Steam cloud sync (enabled by default), while the game is still open because closing it will overwrite your cloud save.

[Alshain]

I can understand the technical difficulties, but if you lose a hardcore game because hit the wrong button, that's a skill thing and you should either accept that as a loss or don't play hardcore lol. Makes no sense to play hardcore if your just going to restore it when you screw something up. (though, restoring it because of hardware problems like the OP, I would see that as perfectly fine, you didn't die to lack of skill)

[carl.kenner]

Sometimes you have to go and do something urgently, so you pause the game and go, and then discover when you come back that it didn't pause because Esc doesn't work when you're in the inventory or build menu. In situations like that, it's fine to restore your save.

[QuestionableIntentions]

@alshain, @carl.kenner is correct. Stuff happens dude. No need to be an edgelord.

It is absolutely insane to think that hardware/peripheral failure should yield losing "30 hours "of progress on a hardcore save.
I can most certainly say it was not because "I screwed something up" or have a "skill issue", that is a completely unreasonable statement when it was something mostly out of my control.

[GlassDeviant]

Being able to set your game to a paused state quickly so you can attend to real-life issues is a skill. I can exit a machine/container, save the game and open the esc/main menu in under 1 second. Yeah, not an astounding skill deserving accolades and a purple heart medal, but I find it handy. Also remember that this is an unfinished game, so things like alt-tabbing are going to be unstable. You might want to try running in fullscreen-windowed mode rather than absolute fullscreen mode.

That said, I am glad you were able to recover your game from the backup file that was put there for that specific reason (so don't worry about it being patched out someday). Hardcore should be a game skill challenge, with a lower priority than dealing with RL issues.

[t_rex2469]

Bro i died thinking i had paused the game trying to help my dad because he was also playing hardcore he had got lost in the super alloy cave and i had died whilst saving him i was super sad but then i searched up how to save my worl and it led me to this thatnk you so much you save me about a week of progress

[QuestionableIntentions]

Originally posted by t_rex2469:

Bro i died thinking i had paused the game trying to help my dad because he was also playing hardcore he had got lost in the super alloy cave and i had died whilst saving him i was super sad but then i searched up how to save my worl and it led me to this thatnk you so much you save me about a week of progress

Happy to see this post helped you out! I can remember being in my teens when my dad would call me at any time and losing process because I couldn't save where I was at.

[Thiesen]

lol... one of my harddrives died and I lost 20+ YEARS of stuff which I can't get back... so I took it like a man and accepted my stupidity by not doing backups...

No problem... I bought a NAS instead with way more capacity than I haqd before...

[MR.FluFFbaLL]

somehow, after saving, i rejoined the next day, and now my TI is at 890MTi, instead of 1.30GTI D:

[Tare1969]

I did just lose Day+ play. My computer work... Then sound did missed but I save play. Then whole computer did go Tilt, nothing worked... Save game broken... Backup was also broken...