Help - I lost my save file

[Loojers]

I bought the game just last night and played for 4.1 hours. I had a lot of fun so I was really looking forward to playing it today. I opened up the game the next morning, and no saves were present. It just said "Play" > with three empty "New Game" slots.

I've tried various solutions online such as:

• Looking for the steam cloud save - which only had the settings and persistence .json file so that was a dud
  
• Just deleting the 'meta_0' .json file, leaving all other files in there and launching the application
  
• Made sure that all .json files in here had encryption symbols when opening as a .txt file
  
  I'm honestly disheartened to even start a new game in fear that it's going to happen again. Does anyone have any other solutions?

[i have lice]

ive tried everything. theres no hope.

[Clover]

Damn, honestly, the sooner you get started the better