PC All of my characters are gone.

missalece

missalece

Terrarian
So I was going through and deleting my old characters that I don't use anymore, and I decided to delete one titled ".". When I did this, ALL (about 5 or 6) of my characters vanished. I went into the player files and there was nothing in there. Nothing in the Recycle Bin either... If there's nothing I can do, then fine, I'll just start over. :sigh:any help?
 
Here are your available solutions for recovering characters:

There are a plethora of reasons files of missing or get corrupted, it could have been a hardware issue, an operating system issue, a user error, a software confliction or some other software issue. Sometimes it's just plain unavoidable. That's why it's highly recommended to keep manual backups of your files after each play session for Terraria. You can copy the World and Characters folders to other location or an external drive. The default location is \Documents\My Games\Terraria.
1. Check the recycling bin: sometimes files or folders will get placed into the recycling bin despite not anything being wrong with them. This is the first place to check.

If this did not solve your problem, or it does not apply to you move to step 2

2. Check the Steam Data Folder: While sometimes the steam cloud can be the very thing to cause the issue, it might also be the very thing that ends up saving you. Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\STEAM ACCOUNT NUMBER\105600\remote (the steam account number is going to be a collection of random numbers and it will be different for each person. Most likely you will only see one folder so click whichever one shows up.) and see if your files are there.

If this did not solve your problem, or it does not apply to you move to step 3

3. Recover your files from the .bak files: Located in Terraria's default save location which is \Documents\My Games\Terraria you should see a worlds and player folder. Click on whichever folder that applies to you and see if there are any .bak files of your old or missing characters. Simply rename the file extension to .plr if it is a player file or .wld if it is a world file.

If this did not solve your problem, or it does not apply to you move to step 4

4. Revert to a previous version: Sometimes when your character or world gets corrupted the file remains in it's respective default save folder but is simply unusable by the game. You can revert to an earlier version of the file so that you don't lose ALL your progress. Using this method some of your progress will still be lost. First navigate to either \Documents\My Games\Terraria\Worlds or \Documents\My Games\Terraria\Players depending on what kind of file was corrupted. Right click the file and select properties. Now select the "Previous Versions" tab and see if anything is there. If so select the version you wish to revert to, click it, and then click restore.

If this did not solve your problem, or it does not apply to you move to step 5

5. Recreate your character using a Save Editor: Please keep in mind Relogic does not officially support or condone Save Editors and other 3rd Party software. In the event all else has failed you can use an inventory editor to help remake your character so that not all your progress is lost. The one that I like to point people to is TerraSVR because it is all web based and pretty simple to use. If you're having trouble figuring out how to use it there's a help button in the top right to help explain it's various features.
 
"." means "the current directory (= folder)", and by extension all the files in it. ".." means "the directory that contains this one".

In this situation I'd download a free file recovery (aka undelete) utility and see what's not yet been overwritten. I've had good results from Piriform's Recuva and EaseUS' Data Recovery Free but there are plenty of other choices. Unfortunately there's plenty of junkware out there as well so consult a review or three.

If possible do your research on a different device than the PC that has the deleted files. The more you use that machine, the greater the odds that the space formerly used by one ore more files will be re-used, obliterating your data.

Good luck! (feel free to print my avatar and tape it to your PC if necessary)
 
Keep in mind file recovery in this manner is not guaranteed so don't pay for a software solution expecting it to guarantee recovery.

If you have success recovering in this manner I very much would like to know. Being able to add to my list of solutions would help others with similar issues. From my use of programs like this I have not had personal success recovering files in a usuable form in the past but I do hope it works.
 
okay cool. thanks guys, i'll try.

PS, I'm such a damn idiot, lmfao, why would I name a character "."? haha
 
I am absolutely mind-boggled. I wondered what's up with all of this and created a character named . as well, and deleted it in-game afterwards.
And yup, they're all gone. :D (No worries, backed them up first.)

It's like the game is opening a command screen and typing ' del . ', like the good ol' MS DOS days. Whatever the cause, I do think the devs should change this!

If you lost a lot of progress, you could use a character editor to give you your stuff back, like this one: http://yal.cc/r/terrasavr/

And I wouldn't feel like an idiot, if I were you. It's absolutely silly of a game to delete all your characters when you name one ' . '.
I think Red would be like: "Whoops, you did something I didn't think of." if he read this.

Edit: Reported it. Crazy how no one (to my knowledge) ran into this before.
 
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Gotcha! said:
It's like the game is opening a command screen and typing ' del . ', like the good ol' MS DOS days.
Click to expand...
Yes! It's exactly like the MS-DOS days, with good reason. Early versions of Windows were just graphical shells over DOS. Nowadays they've (supposedly) eliminated nearly all the legacy holdovers but for backward compatibility — and perhaps compatibility with Macs and other Unix (or Linux) boxes, which also use this convention — they've kept it all these years.

Since the association between these symbols and filesystem objects is baked into the OS, the obvious fix would be to disallow naming a character either . or .. , eliminating the problem from the supply end so to speak.

Alternatively, the game save/load code could be altered to consider these two (character) names special cases, and munge them into acceptable filenames that are extremely unlikely to be chosen as character names. Maybe __dot__ and __dotdot__ or some such. I dislike adding special cases as they tend to multiply, and sprawling complexity is rarely a good thing (unless there's a balancing benefit). If I were working on Terraria's game load and save code, I'd take the advice from the old joke.

"Doctor, it hurts when I do this."
"So don't do that!"​
 
Bethany said:
Since the association between these symbols and filesystem objects is baked into the OS, the obvious fix would be to disallow naming a character either . or .. , eliminating the problem from the supply end so to speak.
Click to expand...
I understand that it's integral to Windows, but what fails to compute inside my head is: When you create a character in the game and name it ' . ', the filename is actually ' ..plr '. So I wonder what kind of command Terraria calls for to delete the .plr/.bak file.
Does the game literally use a Windows 'del' command in the background? If so, then you place the file name behind it, including the file extension .plr and .bak.
If I have a character called 'Mika', then I can't just type 'del mika', because that file doesn't exist. I'd have to type 'del mika.plr' and 'del mika.bak' to get rid of that character's files. Or 'del mika.*' to delete both at once.
So if I have a character named '.', then it'd go the same, right? So I'd assume the game would then call for a 'del ..player.plr', not a 'del .' . So it wouldn't just clean out your folder.

Gawd, I hope I'm making sense. x)
 
Yes, it makes sense. All I can say is I'll do a complete backup of my game saves directory before deleting my favorite character, "C:\"!

(Kids, don't try this at home. It probably doesn't do what one would expect, but might as well Play It Safe I figure.)
 
can i recover my character if i have .map bc i cant find any .plr or .bak with that character name
 
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