I cant access my world

Ordinary Orange

Skeletron Prime
Hi, I need some help here. At one point, I tried to load my world, but it just gave me a "something went wrong, please try again" message (I forgot what it said exactally). So after a few tries, I tried load backup. All that did was crash the game and give me an error message. And now, whenever I try to get back on terraria, the world says "unknown world" and attempting to load it crashes the game.

EDIT: I have found my world, intact, in my computer’s Terraria files. However, I don’t know how to open it from there, and I have noticed that it doesn’t have a backup, explaining the current “unknown world” appearing instead of it in my world selection. I am still in need of help recovering it.
Oh, yes, and steam is continuously uninstalling and then reinstalling Terraria, before taking my game files back out of the folder. It could be possible that, during this installment, the world got corrupted being translated from my computer’s files to the game’s files.
 
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I took some advice from the other forum and found my world, still intact, in the worlds folder of the terraria game files. It doesn’t have a backup, explaining the blank world that now shows up. So how can I access it?
 
Here are the solutions that may apply to your situation.

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 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 2

2. 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 3

3. 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 those 3 options do not work out for you then you're out of luck. I hope one of these things helps you.
 
The same has happened to me, except I couldn't see my world. I was gonna make a thread on it, but I found Grumpy Squid's post and did that. However, I am pretty sure that if you make another copy of the backup world, you can just make that a .bck file and make it a bit easier to recover the world AGAIN if the corruption happens AGAIN.

Update: It did not work, And I can still not access my world, even thru the bak exstention. If anyone has a solution to a world that cannot be accessed, please let me know. Me and My friends are planning to spend alot of time in the world. Please Convo me the solution. Of course, it didnt work. Im losing all hope rn ;-;
 
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Alright, my solution: because the game is replacing the file with a nonexistent backup file every time, I can see only one way to fix it. You have to reinstall the game without losing existing files, which (hopefully) boots the normal files instead of the backup ones.
I have no idea if this works, because, although Steam used to repeatedly reinstall terraria and get the files back off my computer, it has decided to stop, and uninstalling Terraria manually deletes all information. I don't know why any of that happened in the first place.
Also, are the devs aware of this?
 
Alright I'm not sure I'm on the same page as you. Let's go over a few things.

  • You don't need a .bak file to access the world. .bak files are created after saving the .wld/.plr file. They are for the sole purpose of having a backup in the event a world or player file is corrupted. (these backup files do not have a high success rate of not also being corrupted. This is why I suggest to users to create their own manual backups after each play session in separate directories.) The game will only read and load a .wld or .plr file. It writes .bak files but beyond that the game will not interact with them.
  • Just because you see a world or player file in the file explorer of your operating system does not mean you are able to load the file in game. If a world or player file is corrupted it will show up as "blank" or "unkown" in game. Attempting to load the file anyways, will most likely crash the game. Corrupted world and player files are still visible and present in the file explorer of your OS.
  • When you uninstall a game from steam it does not touch save files or folders created outside the install directory. If you uninstall Terraria through steam, the default save directory (\Documents\My Games\Terraria) will remain intact.
I'm not sure what you mean by anything said in your post, if you could elaborate that would be helpful. If you are consistently experiencing missing files it very could be a hardware malfunction or you are using an imaged machine designed to return the system image to it's original state between reboots. (like a school or work computer).
 
Alright I'm not sure I'm on the same page as you. Let's go over a few things.

  • You don't need a .bak file to access the world. .bak files are created after saving the .wld/.plr file. They are for the sole purpose of having a backup in the event a world or player file is corrupted. (these backup files do not have a high success rate of not also being corrupted. This is why I suggest to users to create their own manual backups after each play session in separate directories.) The game will only read and load a .wld or .plr file. It writes .bak files but beyond that the game will not interact with them.
We are not on the same page. The problem has nothing to do with the normal world. It has to do with the fact that I loaded a backup world, while I had no backup world. The result was it saying “unknown world”
  • Just because you see a world or player file in the file explorer of your operating system does not mean you are able to load the file in game. If a world or player file is corrupted it will show up as "blank" or "unkown" in game. Attempting to load the file anyways, will most likely crash the game. Corrupted world and player files are still visible and present in the file explorer of your OS.
Once again, that is the problem. I’m not trying to contradict you.
  • When you uninstall a game from steam it does not touch save files or folders created outside the install directory. If you uninstall Terraria through steam, the default save directory (\Documents\My Games\Terraria) will remain intact.
That’s good to know. I knew about the save directory, I thought that got deleted, too. Does that come back?
Didn’t say they did. But yes, it stopped. Also it really wasn’t a problem, but it could be on other games.
I'm not sure what you mean by anything said in your post, if you could elaborate that would be helpful. If you are consistently experiencing missing files it very could be a hardware malfunction or you are using an imaged machine designed to return the system image to it's original state between reboots. (like a school or work computer).
Hopefully this clears things up. Oh, and there were no missing files. I updated the first post, maybe you missed that and got off track. You can check it if there’s still something your unsure of.
 
I did some investigating so perhaps we can compare some notes and start to understand together. Pretty sure I got the gist of what you're saying now.

  • I created a world.
  • I moved a world file on to the steam cloud.
  • I deleted the locally stored file at \Documents\My Games\Terraria\Worlds
  • I deleted the local copy of the cloud file from C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\*ACCOUNT NUMBER*\105600\remote.
  • I got in game and went to view the worlds and saw an unknown world from when I trashed the previous mentioned files, obviously attempting to load it crashed the game.
  • I did the equivalent of uninstalling steam or logging into a new computer.
  • Found that the "Unknown" world files have changed back to their names but with red text.
  • Click play and it said it was unable to load world.
  • Clicking on load backup resulted in it saying no backup found.
  • Checked the remote steam directory and found that it had downloaded a 0KB file of the world. A corrupted one obviously (or maybe even just the pointer file?).
  • Click "Move off of Cloud". It placed the 0KB file from the remote directory into the local save directory.
The data above suggests to me that the Steam Cloud doesn't hold the actual files, but pointers which points to the file at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\*ACCOUNT NUMBER*\105600\remote. So if you delete or corrupt both the local save and the save in your remote folder without having first moved your world OFF of the cloud then the pointer file remains pointing to a file that does not exist therefore you see the "Unknown" or "Blank" file.

Uninstalling the game does not remove or mess with the files located in your userdata folder. I tested for that too.
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Either way, once a file has been corrupted and the previously mentioned recovery methods fail then you are unfortunately out of luck and have to create a new world.

If I could ever make a suggestion to the developers to help prevent file corruption in the future it would be the following:

  1. Move the default save directory out of a protected windows library. Move it into Local App Data or the install directory.
  2. Instead of using .bak files (which hardly ever resolve any problem) have the game keep the last 5 play sessions of a world that get rotated out. Keeping them in sub-directories of Session1 Session2 etc.
I feel like those two things would prevent 75% of save corruption woes. I digress. Oh well, I just wish I had better tools to help people who haven't taken preventative measures to safeguard their saves. If you do find someway to recover or restore your save file please tell me so that I may inform others in the future.
 
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Alright, I did the experiment. Somehow, the world files were deleted. I can confirm that by checking the world config files, which are blank. The game probably overrid the old files on saving and quitting.
At this point, it appears that the world cannot be saved.
Sigh.
I would like the devs to know about this problem of the backup file not being created.
 
@Leinfors @Ghostar

When you have some time could you take a look at this thread and pass on a message? Not sure if this is how the developers intended the steam cloud to integrate into the game or not. If you could also get what conditions and parameters must be met for a backup file to be created using the steam cloud and let us know that would be helpful.

Thanks for taking the time to go over this.
 
I'll take a look into it, but it sounds like the entire file was corrupted, Steam Cloud or otherwise, including the backup.
 
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