Character missing after PC crash

Hi! My computer decided to randomly crash earlier today when I was playing, but when I restarted everything and loaded back into the game my character was missing. I read something about corrupted save files about a year ago and I thought it was fixed as I haven’t seen anything related to this recently. I’ve tried fiddling with the save files and steam cloud saves but nothing seems to really do anything, I’ve also verified game files. Was there a fix for this to retrieve it back somehow or did I just get really unlucky? I had spent about 160 hours on the character with tens of thousands of shards and runes, so it kinda hurts. If anyone has an idea on what I could try, please do let me know - otherwise I guess I’ll warn other people that this issue still exists so be careful if you have a computer that tends to crash occasionally.

Welcome to the forums…

All savegames and stash saves are stored locally on your machine so if anything happened to the files then this will obviously affect the characters and shared stash.

If the game crashed when it was trying to write to the savegame / global stash file then its very possible that this did not complete correctly and could potentially corrupt the file to the point where the game can no longer open it successfully.

If you look in the savegames folder, you will find an _temp version of each savegame and the global stash save file. This _temp file is the previous version of the file and may not be corrupted. If you backup all the saves etc, then you can try and swap the _temp for the active one (simply rename them) and see i the older version will load…

Steam can sometimes cause its own set of problems with the savegames as steam will blindly sync the problem corrupted files back to the cloud and when you change the local file then steam overwrites it on next sync - i.e. it can cause the corrupted version to keep coming back… you need to temporarily disable Steam cloud while trying to fix the issue and you may have to login to steam via a webbrowser and check the Remote Storage section to remove the problem files.

Personally I do not use Steam Cloud saves and I manually backup all my savegames - especially if I am playing any games in Early Access/Beta - this way if anything happens I can simply restore a previous save and the worst I have lost is the last playsession…

If none of this helps then I am afraid that no-one can help you… EHG has no access to your savegames and cannot restore anything on your behalf… This will only change once the full online multiplayer part of the game is added and your characters then have the option of being server based…

Regarding crashing - LE is in beta and obviously has performance & stability issues but if you do not try and run the game at settings that push your hardware, you can find a very stable configuration to play at… for example, I have been playing for over 1500h now and I can count the number of random crashes on one hand… but I play at reduced settings on my hardware… If I play at higher settings (which I sometimes do specifically to test) I can almost guarantee the game will crash in certain situations.

Obviously if your system itself is unstable, that is a different issue entirely and I’d recommend resolving that irrespective of LE…

Hey there and thank you for the suggestions, although I have tried everything mentioned already and it seems like the steam cloud instantly synced the corrupted file and I haven’t been able to find one that works. I understand this is out of EHG hands and I’m not blaming anyone, I just wasn’t expecting a random computer crash to completely delete game progress.

I haven’t had any issues with Last Epoch crashing whatsoever, I don’t think it’s happened even once during my 160 hours. My computer on the other hand has had a few crashes the last few months, most likely due to a faulty fan. The hardware itself is very high end and it has no issues running the game at any level of graphics with respectable framerates, this is not part of the issue.

I appreciate the answer and suggestions and I realise this post was a long shot, but it’s safe to say I won’t be playing Last Epoch anymore until the full release with these issues still existing. Looking forward to the future of the game and wish you all the best, it’s a fantastic game you have in the making.

Be careful with this assumption… Remember the game is in beta and unoptimised… It has issues so if you attempt to run the game at settings that your hardware “should be able” to handle, the game itself might not be able to do it yet… Your hardware is only one part of the equation and not understanding the interaction with the current state of the game will cause you to assume the wrong things…

Its not a perfect analogy, but its like putting your foot down in a sportcar that hasnt been fully tuned / completed yet… it might backfire, the mix might be wrong, the tires might be loose, the brakes missing, a bolt not tightened etc… either way, its going to be a bad experience vs just driving the car slowly around the block to test a few things…

Entirely up to you, but obviously for local offline play, there is no way to know (based on the info you have provided) what exactly caused your problem - and without knowing the details, I cannot say if the devs would ever be able to fix an “issue” like this. The online version will bypass the issue by using server saves, but there will always be an offline version too and while the game should be more optimised by launch, if someones computer just crashes for an unrelated issue, the game would never be able to prevent corruption on its own…

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