Losing characters

[SweetCheeksSr]

I have taken a look over the recent update reports given from the Developers, and It didn't necessarily make clear that the losing characters on logout was fixed? I have created a dedicated server for me and two other buddies, and I have lost 2 characters in a matter of 4 days. I lost my first one while in the mountains trying to upgrade all my wolf armor, when the game auto-saved into a new day. Character? Deleted. I refused to play for a day. Came back into a single player, devcommanded my items back, played for 2-3 days. Made a base in the plains, decorated, logged out. Error pops up when logging out. Didn't think anything of it, come back the next day to play. Character? Deleted. I haven't opened up Valheim since.

Has this been fixed? This ruins so much immersion to me that I cannot continue to play the same character and build my stats.

[electricdawn]

So, I've never had the experience that you can actually lose a character on logout. World resets, yes, but never characters. Usually character data is very small, and can be written fast, so I'm quite surprised this even is a thing.

So what happened after the auto save? You said your character was deleted, but you didn't specify what happend. Did the game crash? Could you continue playing? Did the character really get deleted, or did it just get reset to day 1 with no items and skills?

BTW, you can restore your most recent character, as Valheim now creates a copy of the last two 2 hour saves and a 12 hour save. You can even set the number of saved copies higher (something I highly recommend).

Do you want instructions on how to do that?

Edit:
I also highly advise you on starting to do periodic backups of all your personal data. As you have experienced, computers and software can fail (like all human made things), and you will lose data, that you cannot recover if you don't have backups.

External hard drives are cheap, your personal data is priceless.

[Atma]

Interesting.

My wife lost her character the other day (new character, created on latest patch) when her computer crashed.

When she logged back in, the character was just gone. No data. No data in the saves folder. No data in the Steam cloud. Just vanished, like it never existed.

She only lost about a full day of progress, but still extremely discouraging. Didn't realize this was a thing.

[SweetCheeksSr]

Originally posted by electricdawn:

So, I've never had the experience that you can actually lose a character on logout. World resets, yes, but never characters. Usually character data is very small, and can be written fast, so I'm quite surprised this even is a thing.

So what happened after the auto save? You said your character was deleted, but you didn't specify what happend. Did the game crash? Could you continue playing? Did the character really get deleted, or did it just get reset to day 1 with no items and skills?

BTW, you can restore your most recent character, as Valheim now creates a copy of the last two 2 hour saves and a 12 hour save. You can even set the number of saved copies higher (something I highly recommend).

Do you want instructions on how to do that?

Edit:
I also highly advise you on starting to do periodic backups of all your personal data. As you have experienced, computers and software can fail (like all human made things), and you will lose data, that you cannot recover if you don't have backups.

External hard drives are cheap, your personal data is priceless.

the game crashed when it changed into a new day. I still had the files for my character the first time. However, the character no longer showed up in my character list.
The second time, no character data at all in my files. Game reported an error on "Quit" .

[SweetCheeksSr]

Originally posted by Atma:

Interesting.

My wife lost her character the other day (new character, created on latest patch) when her computer crashed.

When she logged back in, the character was just gone. No data. No data in the saves folder. No data in the Steam cloud. Just vanished, like it never existed.

She only lost about a full day of progress, but still extremely discouraging. Didn't realize this was a thing.

I had the same issue on my second character. Just deleted. Like It never happened. Haven't been on in 4-5 days since it happened.

[electricdawn]

I would try to install the current test patch, which will give you an interface to recover older saves from both of your world and character.

If you can recover them, I would IMMEDIATELY move them local (there's a button for that) and then turn Steam Cloud OFF in the global Steam settings. Steam Cloud has been the bane of many players.

I also advise you to perform periodic backups of your personal data, as you have seen that computers and software can fail.

Let me know if you need any further instructions on how to install the test patch and how it all worked out.

[Atma]

If the cloud is the culprit, I'll just move everything to local and make sure to backup regularly. We play modded (have already exhausted base content several times over lol) so I don't want any issues w/ the test patch.

Thanks for the heads up!

[electricdawn]

If you play modded, then the issue might actually be related to a mod. I would create a separate, plain vanilla installation of Valheim and see if it crashes there as well.

[Atma]

Originally posted by electricdawn:

If you play modded, then the issue might actually be related to a mod. I would create a separate, plain vanilla installation of Valheim and see if it crashes there as well.

Oh, the crash wasn't game related, it was a RAM error. It just happened that we lost the character when it crashed because of the RAM.

I use Thunderstore, which keeps the original vanilla install at all times and only mods the game through injectors and not dirty edits.

I'm fairly experienced w/ mods and modding, that wasn't the issue in this case, but I am fully aware that is the usual culprit. ; )

[electricdawn]

Oh, ok, so it wasn't even Valheim related. This was not made clear in your original post. ;)

[Atma]

Originally posted by electricdawn:

Oh, ok, so it wasn't even Valheim related. This was not made clear in your original post. ;)

Oh no, I wasn't trying to imply that the game had caused the crash, I apologize that I wasn't clear!

The issue was the lost character data itself, which honestly probably shouldn't be lost entirely (not even any backup or character data folder, etc) if a computer crashes.

We have only ever had this happen once since the game launched in EA, so I figured I'd mention it and saw that others had a similar issue.

Sorry for any confusion there!

[joshuatkadrmas]

My character disappeared from the selection screen tonight.

I got a "Virtual Alloc remapping failed" message while playing. The game reset, now my character is gone. The world data is still accessible, and I can find the backup files on the Steam Cloud server, but I can't figure out how to reload them.

[SweetCheeksSr]

Originally posted by joshuatkadrmas:

My character disappeared from the selection screen tonight.

I got a "Virtual Alloc remapping failed" message while playing. The game reset, now my character is gone. The world data is still accessible, and I can find the backup files on the Steam Cloud server, but I can't figure out how to reload them.

This is the exact error I was getting

[electricdawn]

If your character is on Steam Cloud (get the latest backup character, NOT the one were the name is just the character name!), you can download it by clicking on the download link.

What happens next depends if you're willing to turn off Steam Cloud, something I HIGHLY recommend doing.

If you're willing to do so, I would
1. download the latest backup of your character from Steam Cloud. Put it in a safe place.
2. Enter Valheim.
a. If you have another character, select that one.
b. If not, just create a quick dummy char. Doesn't have to be nice.
3. Next, select your world and MOVE it to local with the appropriate button.
4. Exit Valheim.
5. Go into Steam settings, Cloud, and turn OFF Steam Cloud. IMPORTANT!

Once that is done, you can move the backup of your char into the proper location.

The older copies of your character files should have a name like:

YOURCHAR_backup_auto-20220817150973.fch

were YOURCHAR should be the actual name of your character.

The long string of numbers is the date and (I guess) a serial timestamp when the world was saved. In the example above Aug, 17th, 2022, at some later time.

So, make a copy the retrieved character (always work on copies!), and rename it, so it resembles YOURCHAR.fch (YOURCHAR being the actual name of your character).

Once that is done, move it into here:

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

If the "characters_local" folder does not exist yet, you can just create it.

Please let me know if that helped, or if you need further instructions.

[honeyrider28]

This has happened to me as well. Valheim game crashed with a GC error and after I verified files and logged in again, my character was gone. I play with steam cloud turned on (as I thought I had to do that so others could come and play on my map) and it has 343 hours on it so I am fairly disheartened. There was a character.fch file in Character_local but is was from over a month ago and at that time I had selected "move to local"

Are you saying that there is a place in Steam Cloud that has a copy of my character? And if so, how do I access that to download it. The maps associated with that character are now gone as well.

[joshuatkadrmas]

This worked for me. I took a bit to figure out where they were stored, as the "AppData" folder was not initially visible. Found it by entering search: %AppData%

Originally posted by electricdawn:

If your character is on Steam Cloud (get the latest backup character, NOT the one were the name is just the character name!), you can download it by clicking on the download link.

What happens next depends if you're willing to turn off Steam Cloud, something I HIGHLY recommend doing.

If you're willing to do so, I would
1. download the latest backup of your character from Steam Cloud. Put it in a safe place.
2. Enter Valheim.
a. If you have another character, select that one.
b. If not, just create a quick dummy char. Doesn't have to be nice.
3. Next, select your world and MOVE it to local with the appropriate button.
4. Exit Valheim.
5. Go into Steam settings, Cloud, and turn OFF Steam Cloud. IMPORTANT!

Once that is done, you can move the backup of your char into the proper location.

The older copies of your character files should have a name like:

YOURCHAR_backup_auto-20220817150973.fch

were YOURCHAR should be the actual name of your character.

The long string of numbers is the date and (I guess) a serial timestamp when the world was saved. In the example above Aug, 17th, 2022, at some later time.

So, make a copy the retrieved character (always work on copies!), and rename it, so it resembles YOURCHAR.fch (YOURCHAR being the actual name of your character).

Once that is done, move it into here:

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

If the "characters_local" folder does not exist yet, you can just create it.

Please let me know if that helped, or if you need further instructions.