How to Preserve a Long-Dormant Valheim World?

[gobigred]

A little background: we (myself, spouse and son) are a Valheim player "family"and have an ongoing Valheim world on my son's laptop (which was set up to be a private server just for our family). The world has several hundred hours of play, but has been almost completely unplayed and untouched since September 2021 when our son suddenly passed away.

As you can imagine, this has been quite an emotional conflict for us. We have his laptop and all the access credentials for his Steam account. On the one hand, we haven't yet been able to bring ourselves to resume play (and see our son's character in the game), but at the same time we don't want to lose this world and all the memories that accompany it (and we may resume play at some point).

Since that time, our daughter's fiance gave the laptop a look and backed up what he said was the Valheim data folder (and we stored copies of it around other household computers for safekeeping). A while ago, my spouse did briefly start the game on the laptop just to confirm that we could get it going again, but only spent 30 seconds or so with no play activity before backing out.

Obviously the main question: since the Valheim platform has undergone many updates and significant advances since then, is there anything we should do to update the world and ensure that it doesn't become inoperable (if, God forbid, it hasn't done so already) when the platform updates? (We MAY have applied the Hearth and Home update before we stopped playing but I am not 100% sure.)

Related to this, I have been thinking that we might start a new world (or worlds), either together (and hosted on one of the other household computers) or single-player (playing local on each of our computers), to reacquaint ourselves with the gameplay, skills, etc. I dipped my toe in the water a few days ago and started to create a new single-player local game. I noticed that my character from the old "family" world was still there (and I remember my son saying that our characters were saved locally and could, in fact, be introduced into another game/world). At that point, though, I also saw some update alert about local vs. cloud saves. Not quite understanding what was going on, I "chickened out" and exited for fear of inadvertently corrupting my character data.

So this is the second question: can we create and start other worlds on other computers, and either use our old characters or create new ones, without disturbing our old characters or otherwise compromising our ability to get back into our old family world?

I'm sure that this is "simple stuff" for many of you expert gamers, so I apologize for what are probably dumb questions. We just want to see where (and how) we go from here in Valheim!

Thanks,
Mike

[vinyblaster]

Hey Mike,

First of all, sorry for your loss.

Then, to try to answer your question I'm just gonna describe how worlds/characters work and you can do with it whatever you want :)

First of, I have not heard of a world becoming "obsolete". AFAIK, IG has been very good at preserving forward compatibility, meaning that as the game receives updates, older worlds remain functional and all undiscovered areas receive the new code. As a simple example: if you have a world created before the addition of frost caves, it will still be playable with the caveat that explored mountains won't have retroactively generated caves. Mountains that have not yet been revealed will.

As a side note for my point above: there is a mod to force the regeneration of a world. The idea would be to preserve your bases, but regenerate the entire map with the new code. Continuing with my example above, this would add frost caves in the mountains you've already explored.

Second, how worlds and characters work. They are mostly independent. A world can be booted with any character, and a character can play on any world.

Your best bet at this point would be to create a backup of your world and characters. The default location for these files is: C:\Users\<yourUsername>\AppData\LocalNow\IronGate\Valheim\

in this folder you'll see sub-directory for characters and worlds with, in each, files named after your characters and worlds. Once you've found this you should make a backup of the whole "Valheim" folder, that way you can always retrieve your worlds/characters. If you screw up something, you can always override the entire Valheim folder with the backup.

I recommend *not* using the cloud and stick to local characters and worlds. There has been many issues in the past with cloud saves.

From there, you can do whatever. Keep playing on your existing world with your characters, start a new world with these characters, play the existing world with new characters, or start a new world with new characters. Everything is possible.

[Zepheros]

Was in the middle of posting a response but steam mobile really sucks ass...

viny covered about everything I was going to touch on. The mod he is referring to is called Upgrade World and does exactly what it says. Upgrades explored areas without requiring a new world for new content. I've used it for every major update (Mountain caves, Tarpits, Mistlands and Hildir) without issue on my world and it's originally from March 2021.

Like he said, a character can be played on any world. That's locally saved data. Easy to back up with a .bat file.

I also recommend not using cloud saving as there are too many instances of the cloud overwriting the most recent save data and undoing hours of play time. The only downside is you're unable to jump right back into the game from another device, if you play on more than one computer.

[A-mak]

To add to the above, the mention of 'the cloud' refers to steam cloud, mine works fine and you can download your steam-cloud data through the steam website.

Once you have the individual .fch (character) and .fwl+.db (world) files I absolutely do recommend keeping a copy stored on 'the cloud' such as an email to yourself, google drive/one-drive or whatever you use as well as local copies on a computer, cd or usb. Local copies are at risk of corruption due to device failure, energy leakage over time or even a solar flare. 3 different backup methods is a good starting point.

If you ever feel like going on that world again it is as simple as copying the world files to said folder on any machine with valheim installed, if you copy the character files you will then see the character in the main menu character selection screen.

I have no doubt that worlds will work even after final release, I purchased the game when it first came out and my very first world still loads fine, the most I have ever done is the 'update terrain' command to use the newer optimised terrain. Judging by IronGates updates, they trickle little fixes that break all the mods mainly for console support and then content updates to the empty biomes. Only if you used mods on that world could things be an issue.

[gobigred]

Many thanks to all who just responded so quickly, and for taking the time to pen such comprehensive replies! (Zepheros, sorry that Steam Mobile bit you in the butt...)

And a big sigh of relief as it seems that our legacy world will persist as the game evolves (and props to IG for facilitating that with their update protocols). We don't use any mods here so that helps. (If we ever do decide to give Upgrade World a whirl at some future I will be back to pick more brains about that...)

Probably another silly question, but: it seems that you can only save the current world state and override any earlier save. Is there a way to save multiple states over time where you can roll back to an earlier state if something in the game play goes horribly wrong?

A-mak's info on the filenames was illuminating, and I think it's got me onto something that's gotten whopperjawed here. I just did some checking and the "backup" that we've been saving does NOT contain any individual .fch (character) and .fwl+.db (world) files! First of all, the folder is NOT named "Valheim"... it's called "User_76561199123106904" so I have a feeling that it came from some other location than the default one that viny mentioned. Also, that folder has only two main subfolders ("Player" and "World") and the multiple sub-subfolders inside seem to have date/timestamped names and each contains only a single .rgd file. Is this aforementioned data of any value?

Now I'm not sure where my future son-in-law dug that data up. I have a feeling that we need to get back on the laptop and hunt down and backup the content of the default location.

Thanks,
Mike

[knighttemplar1960]

My wife and I have played through the game several times and we become attached to our characters and hate to delete them so we decided to use our very first world as an "Idyll" world where our characters go when they retire. We don't really play the idyll world but occasionally will log one of the characters on just to feed livestock or wander around the base that is growing to accommodate all the retired characters.

The characters bring all surplus material from the worlds they played in and add their own bed room to the Idyll base. It doesn't matter to us if the other boimes update in that world or get added as long as the meadows base is unaffected.

You could do something similar with your family world. Retire all the characters that played in that world, to that world, and set up a room for your son's character where you can display all his gear on item stands and log on and wander through his room when missing him becomes overwhelming to remember the fun times you all had playing together.

"Remember that first troll we faced that killed mom 3 times? Our son made its hide into the troll cape that he wore and is now displayed on that armor stand. Take that vile troll. A son's revenge in defense of his mom."

Little memories like that can help get over the rough times. I did something like that when my dad passed away. I took some of his photos, his military awards from WWII, a shell casing from his 18 gun salute at his funeral, his favorite fishing lure, his gold watch from his retirement, the barbecue tongs we always used when we grilled out after he retired, and other small mementos that are meaningful to me and arranged them in a plexiglass case that I made so I could look at them when ever dad comes to mind. We used to sit together and watch Hogan's Heroes. When ever I really miss him I put a DVD into the player and watch a Hogan's Heroes episode. Things like that help get past that empty feeling when it gets over whelming.

[Mandos]

Originally posted by gobigred:

... backed up what he said was the Valheim data folder ...

Valheim has an abstruse way of storing save game files. It also has different files for characters and for worlds, so it's easy to backup the wrong files.

If you want to be on the safe side make sure you go to:

%userprofile%\AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\

and backup the folders worlds and characters. There might also be a folder called worlds_local which you may also want to backup.

Also look at

path_of_your_Steam_installaion_folder\Steam\userdata\a_long_number_which_is_your_Steam-ID\892970\remote

which might have the folders characters and worlds too. Those are cloud saves. Cloud saves have been added quite some time after the early access release, so those might not exist on your laptop.

Character files end with .fch and world files need two files which end in .db and .fwl which you will need both of.

[vinyblaster]

Originally posted by gobigred:

Many thanks to all who just responded so quickly, and for taking the time to pen such comprehensive replies! (Zepheros, sorry that Steam Mobile bit you in the butt...)

And a big sigh of relief as it seems that our legacy world will persist as the game evolves (and props to IG for facilitating that with their update protocols). We don't use any mods here so that helps. (If we ever do decide to give Upgrade World a whirl at some future I will be back to pick more brains about that...)

Probably another silly question, but: it seems that you can only save the current world state and override any earlier save. Is there a way to save multiple states over time where you can roll back to an earlier state if something in the game play goes horribly wrong?

A-mak's info on the filenames was illuminating, and I think it's got me onto something that's gotten whopperjawed here. I just did some checking and the "backup" that we've been saving does NOT contain any individual .fch (character) and .fwl+.db (world) files! First of all, the folder is NOT named "Valheim"... it's called "User_76561199123106904" so I have a feeling that it came from some other location than the default one that viny mentioned. Also, that folder has only two main subfolders ("Player" and "World") and the multiple sub-subfolders inside seem to have date/timestamped names and each contains only a single .rgd file. Is this aforementioned data of any value?

Now I'm not sure where my future son-in-law dug that data up. I have a feeling that we need to get back on the laptop and hunt down and backup the content of the default location.

Thanks,
Mike

The game automatically saves a few files for your worlds and characters. There is a "manage saves" menu in the game that allows you to restore a specific backup. However, AFAIK there is no way to save when you want and make surthis backup doesn't get overridden. I haven't played with this too much so others may know better what's possible there.

As for your save files, it doesn't match the current save structure and format, but it may be due to a game upgrade that happened after you stopped playing. I know there was an update in the past where they did a lot of work on the save system. You could start the game with this backup and see if it gives you the option to migrate it forward. Just make sure you keep an original copy somewhere.

[Mharr]

If you're able to log into your son's Steam account, you can access and manually download everything saved to his cloud storage here: https://store.steampowered.com/account/remotestorage