Progress and unlocks have vanished!!

[Cucumbertronic]

This is strange. I have unlocked every ship, quite a while ago (got over 300hrs gametime). But I loaded up today and 1/2 of them are gone. And my stats are wiped down to about where I was 30hrs in. This is a bit upsetting because I have completed FTL on hard with a few of the ships now.

Could anyone tell me what might have happened? Is it at steam's end or at my end? I've not messed with directories at all.

[dk]

Do you backup your system -- eiother online or on an exteriod HD ? If you played last quite a while ago you could possibly locate your save files. Sometimes you can find them on a Windows system restore search. I assume you're playing on a PC. The save file is in Documents\mygames\FasterThanLight. Or --- search for "ae_prof.sav"

[Teotwawki]

I hadn't played FTL in quite a while, but started up a game a couple of days ago, and noticed the same thing.

All previous progress was missing. I'm not sure what OS you are using, I am playing on Ubuntu Linux 12.04 so my directory structure may be different than yours.

What I found was that my previous progress file was in

home/username/.local/share/fasterthanlight

while the new current progress file was located in

home/username/.local/share/FasterThanLight

The progress file was called ae_prof.sav

On linux, the capitalisation in the folder makes a difference, not sure about Mac or Win.

I renamed the current ae_prof.sav to back it up, then copied the old file into the new folder.

This recovered all my old progress.

I have a suspicion that on OS's that treat capital/non-capital filenames as being equal, the new folder name may have over-written the old folder name, erasing the old progress file, but that is a guess.

Hope you manage to recover your old progress, good luck.

[Ray Robertson]

It does sound as if your profile file was overwritten with an older one. Did you perhaps have Cloud saving enabled in the past and then disabled it and then recently had it enabled again?

Steam should have prompted you to overwrite though.

[Cucumbertronic]

Thanks guys. Your advice is spot on. I had some trouble with 'my documents' the other day when my explorer.exe crashed and I needed to copy another one off a win7 boot CD. I thought all the save data was in the steam folders. Oh man, I hope my back up of 'my documents' isn't too ancient. Going to check it now!

[Cucumbertronic]

Oh woe is me :(

No sign of any older my documents folders. What is really confusing though is that, if I'd wiped the save folder out then I should have NO progress. But about half the ships are unlocked. Very strange. It's like it's loading my game from a year and a half ago.

btw, there's two files in 'fasterthanlight' :

'ae_prof_new.sav' modified today

and

'prof.sav' modified in 02/04/2014

I found another 'my documents' folder on my comp I didn't know about. But it has an empty 'my games' folder. I wonder if something has been merged and overwritten without my knowledge when I was unpacking win7 to get a new explorer file?

Would saves be different when I load steam up 'as administrator'? Because I sometimes do that to get civ5 working..

[Ray Robertson]

prof.sav is your pre-Advanced Edition profile file. I have never seen or read of an ae_prof_new.sav file, ae_prof.sav is the 'normal' filename for the Advanced Edition profile file.

I remember when one ran Advanced Edition for the first time and already had a pre-AE profile file in My Documents it created a ae_prof.sav that included your unlocks and stats.

Maybe ae_prof_new.sav is created in the event that the game doesn't find ae_prof.sav, but does find prof.sav and it is not the first time AE is run.

Not sure this info would help you though.

[Cucumbertronic]

That does help Ray. Thinking about it; I got about half the ships before the advanced upgrade, so it has taken my progress from my old prof.sav and written over my ae_prof.sav. Very strange!
I've got a horrible feeling this is unfixable then....

[Ray Robertson]

There is a profile editor available if you want to hack your ships back in. I think google will find it if you're interested in doing that.

[Cucumbertronic]

Thanks :) I suppose I'll take this opportunity to try the mods also. I'd been putting it off, bit since I'm going to mess with it all anyway - I might as well!