Missing world?

[MOK]

I've just booted up the game for the second time in singleplayer, and cannot find a way to load my progress. There's no continue button, i can't find any reference to loading, and I can't find any reference to the world I thought I made when I first launched the game. So all my progress is gone.

I suspect there's no getting it back; I'm looking in the abiotic factor/saved/ folder tree, and under worlds, there's no folder for my unfortunately marathon session. It kept my scientist though, apparently.

Any suggestions on where to look, or what I did wrong? I know this is early access, so I expect bugs, but this is one of the worst sorts. And if it's not a bug, then it means that I somehow misunderstood the UI to sabotage myself.... which I'd actually say is a problem with the UI, rather than me.

Is this a common scenario? I did some searches but am not finding threads akin to what happened to me.

[CombatWombat]

Enter the facility
Load game
Select game
Click host game

If there is no game under load game then it is indeed gone. A good habit is to just copy the safe folder so you can always restore a safe.

[MechWarden]

That is not common at all. Usually a save disappears when you change PCs or outright delete the folder. Though even if you change PCs, you will very likely have a save via Steam Cloud Save, since that's enabled by default. Plus, the game auto saves every 5 minutes, so at worse if your game crashes you lose 5 minutes of progress. Lastly, there are backup saves just in cause your save gets corrupted.

Though as to where to look, the easiest way is to make a new save, enter it, back out, and then go back to Load Game, select the save, and then click "Open Save Folder". That will open up a File Explorer folder in the area where save files are stored.

If your old save isn't anywhere near there, you can still do a search for other folders with the same name as your save folder, since the root game file folder use Steam ID numbers for games.

[MOK]

I spent a while searching around all the abiotic factor folder trees, and never found the world save. Since it was my first time booting up, I can't be 100% sure of what I could've done wrong when setting up the game. But with so decades experience tinkering with these kinds of things, it doesn't feel plausible that I set up the game wrong. So that leaves me at a dead end.

I started a new game, seemed to follow the same route and settings, and a new world folder pops up in the expected folder. Starting over goes quickly at least, since orientation is what's most time consuming, and you know what you can disregard.

But I do suspect this was some kind of bug, rather than only user error. I submitted a bug report. Good luck if anyone else runs into this; I wish I had something useful to convey.

[MechWarden]

I hope it is just a fluke. I'm at a loss on how that even happened.

I assume you tried searching on other drives (if you have any).

[Natjur]

Dedicated Server you can setup auto backups, would be nice to have the same option on single player/Local Hosting

[MechWarden]

As I said, there are backup files in case the main file(s) get corrupted; though it won't help much if a troll did something ages ago or be used for save scumming.

But what OP ran into is that everything is missing, despite the game normally saving often and with safeties and backups.