Planet disappeared....?

[RipaMoram117]

Okay guys, this is an massive issue. I was working on a ship in orbit above my plantarey base (on the "Titan" moon orbiting the Alien planet), and I thought I'd look over at the base for a second... But the planet isn't there... What has happened is that the moon is completely gone, the base and GPS co-ords are still there, so I know that I am in the right place, but the moon is completely gone, as is obviously apparent, this is a massive issue. Does anyone know what has happened? How do I fix it? What caused it?? So many questions.
Thanks for any answers you guys can give, I really need help on this one, spent a fair shout of time on this base and it's tailored to the landscape it's on

[cptsavarus]

I had an Earth-like planet disappear out of a world not long ago.

It was a creative mode world I was using purely for loading & tssting workshop stuff. I spawned the planet in manually so I could use it as a backdrop for some cool screenshots. Didn't build anything on the planet but later made 2 saves of the world - one where my 'naut was on the planets surface & one where he was in space.

Loaded & saved both worlds many times without any problem.

Then one day I loaded up the one where my 'naut was in space... and the planet was gone.
In the other save it's still there.

Thankfully didn't loose any builds - just the planet.
Half expected it to return as mysteriously as it vanished but so far no such luck. Very weird!

No idea the cause, nor how to fix it / prevent it happening. My guess is it's a corruption of the save file whereby references are somehow being deleted. If that's the case then there's nothing can be done. Just take it as a reminder to back up your saves.

Since you still have the station though, take a blueprint of it then you can paste it into a new world... or spawn a new moon into your existing world. Might take time to find the exact same spot to place the station but reckon those are your only options.

[RipaMoram117]

Originally posted by cptsavarus:

I had an Earth-like planet disappear out of a world not long ago.

It was a creative mode world I was using purely for loading & tssting workshop stuff. I spawned the planet in manually so I could use it as a backdrop for some cool screenshots. Didn't build anything on the planet but later made 2 saves of the world - one where my 'naut was on the planets surface & one where he was in space.

Loaded & saved both worlds many times without any problem.

Then one day I loaded up the one where my 'naut was in space... and the planet was gone.
In the other save it's still there.

Thankfully didn't loose any builds - just the planet.
Half expected it to return as mysteriously as it vanished but so far no such luck. Very weird!

No idea the cause, nor how to fix it / prevent it happening. My guess is it's a corruption of the save file whereby references are somehow being deleted. If that's the case then there's nothing can be done. Just take it as a reminder to back up your saves.

Since you still have the station though, take a blueprint of it then you can paste it into a new world... or spawn a new moon into your existing world. Might take time to find the exact same spot to place the station but reckon those are your only options.

Yeah, it's kind of weird, I managed to save the progrerss by getting theBP from the no planets world and spawned it in a backup with the planets still there. So for now the problems are gone, but it seems that when it saves it just updates the backup but not the main file.... Meaning that I have to go into the backups every time to access the most recent file, a bit annoying but otherwise functional

[cptsavarus]

How do you save your games?

There are 2 ways of saving manually, right. Either you bring up the pause menu & click save or you quit the game & save on exit.

If you're saving on exit that could be causing things to not get saved, hence you're having to use previous backups.

Don't know if it's still the case but it used to be that if you saved a world on exit then published it to the workshop, there would be no main thumbnail on the published item. If you wanted a thumbnail you'd have to save manually, then exit without saving.

I know it's a different thing but it's possible something similar is happening, where references that exist in the world aren't being indexed in the latest save file but somehow are in the backups. Just a theory.

Try not using the "save on exit" feature & see if you still get the problem.
I got into the habbit of not using it early on and haven't had any trouble with corrupted saves at all - except for the missing planet just recently. Worth a try anyhow.

[RipaMoram117]

Originally posted by cptsavarus:

How do you save your games?

There are 2 ways of saving manually, right. Either you bring up the pause menu & click save or you quit the game & save on exit.

If you're saving on exit that could be causing things to not get saved, hence you're having to use previous backups.

Don't know if it's still the case but it used to be that if you saved a world on exit then published it to the workshop, there would be no main thumbnail on the published item. If you wanted a thumbnail you'd have to save manually, then exit without saving.

I know it's a different thing but it's possible something similar is happening, where references that exist in the world aren't being indexed in the latest save file but somehow are in the backups. Just a theory.

Try not using the "save on exit" feature & see if you still get the problem.
I got into the habbit of not using it early on and haven't had any trouble with corrupted saves at all - except for the missing planet just recently. Worth a try anyhow.

I do save on exity, but I dop also have the habit of saving then exiting. So if it does corrupt I hopefuly have that one point to go back to, it's strange but yeah.. In any case do you know how to make the backup file the main one accessible without ther need to access it from the backups menu? All progress is now saving to that one which is fine except I have to go through the menus

[cptsavarus]

To be honest I haven't had a proper look at how the new backup saves thing works. I just know that it's got some kind of directory structure to it now, which to my mind makes it more complicated than it needs to be, hence I try not to pay attention to it.

I don't know if there's an easier way to turn a backup file into a master file but off the top of my head there's 2 long ways of doing it. The simplest is this...

Load the backup that's the right one.
Open the menu & click "Save as".
Enter a new name for the new file - something easy to recognise.
Exit without saving.
Now load the new file. In theory it should have no backups of its own yet as it's a brand new file.

If all goes well, you should now have a copy of the correct version of your world.

If it works I recommend deleting the old save, along with all its backups, then making a second copy of the new save to archive as a kind of restore point in case anything goes wrong.

Also recommend not saving on exit at all with the new file & only ever saving manually.
Seems like the "save on exit" function is causing the game to become confused as to which backup it's supposed to be using. Not a great surprise as that function has always done some strange things.

Be sure to make blueprints of everything in the world you don't want to loose, just in case it all goes pear-shaped & you loose the world.

Some other things that may help keep things manageable in future...
-Turn autosave off if it's not already. The fewer times a file gets written to the less likely it is to get corrupted.
-Reduce the number of backups in the world settings menu to just a couple. This wont lower the chances of corruption happening but it'll reduce confusion when it comes to knowing which file is which.