World has disappeared on reinstall

[Illustrious Illusionist]

So I had to uninstall DF to troubleshoot some other issues, and after I reinstalled, I'm only seeing the "Create New World" button - no option to continue the active game or start a new game in the existing world. What would cause this? Is there anything I can do to salvage it?

[Fel]

Were you perhaps on the beta (version 0.51 with adventure mode) before uninstalling?
If you installed the normal version (0.50) then saves from higher versions won't show and you will need to put the game back into the beta to see them again.

You might want to check the install folder manually, since the saves are located in there.

By the way, you nearly never need to uninstall and reinstall on steam, there is a function to verify the game's files that does pretty much the same (returning all of the game's files to their original ones but not touching saves or config files), without even needing to download much.

[Illustrious Illusionist]

I was definitely on the adventure mode beta, yeah. Would that be the one just marked "beta" in the list of potential branches? I don't know if it would have reinstalled the "previous" version automatically.

Unfortunately I tried updating the install through the Properties to both the beta and experimental branches, even going as far down as 50.10. The save folder in steam/commonapps is also entirely empty. I don't know what could have happened.

[Fel]

It's the "beta - public beta branch" yes.
All of the others are on 0.50.

If you have steam's cloud enabled, the saves might be in steam/userdata instead.

[Illustrious Illusionist]

No luck there either - what I suspect happen is maybe I lost power due to the storm, didn't appreciate how that would get my Steam cloud files out of sync, so when I reinstalled it pulled from the cloud (where I suddenly didn't have anything). Well that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks. At least I know better going forward.

[rome of oxtrot]

Originally posted by Illustrious Illusionist:

No luck there either - what I suspect happen is maybe I lost power due to the storm, didn't appreciate how that would get my Steam cloud files out of sync, so when I reinstalled it pulled from the cloud (where I suddenly didn't have anything). Well that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks. At least I know better going forward.

Dwarf Fortress has no support for Steam Cloud, so this is not what happened.

DF saves games in subfolders of the install folder, so if you uninstalled and purged the installation location, then you would have deleted your saves. (This is not the default behavior of the Steam client, but people sometimes do unwise things without being aware of how unwise they are.)

Also, if you have more than one Steam library on your computer and you reinstalled the game into a different library than it was previously installed in, the save files would still be in the prior installation location.

[RoosterBoy]

yeah, no cloud saves means your saves were uninstalled with the game, never to return.