Heath04🌳
Pumpking
There are a plethora of reason files go missing/get corrupted, it could have been a hardware issue, the operating system, user error, some software conflict or sometimes just unavoidable. If any of the cases I've written this to hopefully help users restore their content so that they can keep playing. If you wish to prevent some of these to go on then I would highly suggest backing up your files.
How do I back up my files?
The simplest way to backup files of course is copying the files in question and pasting them into a secure folder like in your hard drive or you can also use Google Drive it can transfer between Mobile and PC but is a lot more manual. If you also want I can recommend GameSave Manager which is a useful portable app that like the name implies can manage your game saves.
My files is missing, what do I do?
I don't see this question as often but still want to address it as it mainly is the issue of cloud save, I generally think you gotta turn cloud save (Steam Cloud or OneDrive) both off, they cause numerous issues no reason to have them around still. If you press the cloud icon next to your character in the player select screen it will upload your character to Steam Cloud (even if you have Steam Cloud turned off this icon is still visible) It is often a very annoying icon as if you missclick trying to change your name you can click this and upload your character to cloud. Why is this annoying? Moving your character on or off cloud will delete the .map files.
After uploading a character to cloud you can go ahead and check your Recycling Bin and would see the .map files in there, containing all of your map data for any world you've been in. This can also put the entire player in the Recycling Bin (although in my experience this hasn't removed them from the local folder just seeing a copy in the Recycling Bin). It is also useful to know where your Steam Cloud folder is, this location may vary but I you should be able to 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.
My files are corrupted, what do I do?
I have a simple multi-step process I would try 1 by 1 to see if you can restore the files, if not then you can turn to recreating the character/world. To start this off in your File Explorer or whatever your files app it is important to have "File name extensions" turned on, you can find that in your view tab and simply check the box. If the solution didn't work/didn't apply to you go to the next one.
How do I back up my files?
The simplest way to backup files of course is copying the files in question and pasting them into a secure folder like in your hard drive or you can also use Google Drive it can transfer between Mobile and PC but is a lot more manual. If you also want I can recommend GameSave Manager which is a useful portable app that like the name implies can manage your game saves.
My files is missing, what do I do?
I don't see this question as often but still want to address it as it mainly is the issue of cloud save, I generally think you gotta turn cloud save (Steam Cloud or OneDrive) both off, they cause numerous issues no reason to have them around still. If you press the cloud icon next to your character in the player select screen it will upload your character to Steam Cloud (even if you have Steam Cloud turned off this icon is still visible) It is often a very annoying icon as if you missclick trying to change your name you can click this and upload your character to cloud. Why is this annoying? Moving your character on or off cloud will delete the .map files.
After uploading a character to cloud you can go ahead and check your Recycling Bin and would see the .map files in there, containing all of your map data for any world you've been in. This can also put the entire player in the Recycling Bin (although in my experience this hasn't removed them from the local folder just seeing a copy in the Recycling Bin). It is also useful to know where your Steam Cloud folder is, this location may vary but I you should be able to 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.
My files are corrupted, what do I do?
I have a simple multi-step process I would try 1 by 1 to see if you can restore the files, if not then you can turn to recreating the character/world. To start this off in your File Explorer or whatever your files app it is important to have "File name extensions" turned on, you can find that in your view tab and simply check the box. If the solution didn't work/didn't apply to you go to the next one.
- If you are using tModLoader: they have their own page for restoring corrupted files you can find here if not then continue through the guide.
- First navigate to your local saves folder for this example I'm going to use Windows for Mac you're looking for: Library\Application Support\Terraria or for Linux you would use: .local\share\Terraria. Moving on, go to Documents\My Games\Terraria after that you wanna go into the "Worlds" folder if the world is corrupted or the "Players" folder if your character is corrupted. Either or should have a .bak file which is a backup file in case of this happening. Click rename on the .bak file and remove the .bak portion and rename it to either .plr (for a character) or .wld (for your world) and save. This should be able to restore the world or character to normal.
- Sometimes when your character or world gets corrupted the files the file can be restored using the "Previous Versions" tab, go to the same file location and click on the corrupted file and go to "Properties" then click on the "Previous Versions" tab and see if anything is there. If so, then select that version and restore it. This would result is some progress being lost but it can help.
- Checking the Steam Data folder or OneDrive folders if you have those enabled/installed could also be useful just to find another copy that isn't corrupted, while it isn't recommended to use these since they can cause file corruption themselves they can also help since they do automatically back up files. The Steam Cloud* folder can be found here: 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 to get to your OneDrive* folder go to the Start menu and search for OneDrive clicking on the app icon should take you directly to the folder where you can see if your files are there. If so, then you can copy them and paste them into your local saves folder.
- If all else fails and you are left with nothing then there is the method of recreating your characters/world. I have not found a "good" method in recreating characters there is of course Terrasvr a web based character editor but it just relies on you remembering everything that you had, if you can that is good if not then you're sort of out of luck. For worlds I recommend downloading TEdit which isn't web based but is still really useful and has their own guide on how to recreate a world I hope these are good use to you, something of note is that TEdit will not give the items that were in your chests back but you can add in items from TEdit but also relies on memory.
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