New computer - where are my blueprints??? Savegame exists through steam cloud but blueprints dont!!

[DeHeinrich]

Hi guys, I have played factorio for a while and I have accumulated some good blueprints. Custom ones that fill my needs. Now I reset my computer and I do not have said blueprints anymore, just the savegame that steam cloud provides.

Question: what can I do next time so I wont lose my blueprints again if I lose control over my OS again? I will have to reset things again sometime and creating these blueprints took many hours of my precious time!

[RiO]

Syncing blueprints with Steam Cloud is a separate option you have to explicitly enable in the game.

It's also kind of flaky, which is probably why the default is to have it turned off. Some people have experienced losing their blueprint library because it was enabled on one system they played on; syncing it with the cloud, but disabled on another they played on. And somehow they got things into an invalid state where system B's sync up to the cloud caused the library to be erased on system A's sync down from the cloud.

Short of it:
keep that option off and either keep manual backups of your blueprint-storage.dat file; or organize it into suitable books and create export/import strings for the books.


Note that the library you see in-game is actually a local mirror of the real library.
Factorio copies it into the running game each time the save is loaded; and then this copy is saved to disk as part of the save. (It does this for multiplayer synchronization purposes, iirc.)

There's a particular setting available in a hidden power-user/debug menu to switch that mirroring behavior off and retain whatever copy was there in the save to begin with when loading it, rather than overwriting the mirror with the local library.

You can use that option to try and recover your blueprint library:
https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=94427