Offline characters unplayable. Creating new characters crashes the game

Hi Everyone,

To make a long story short - At some point, for no reason that I can discern, I was unable to play the game anymore, since, I couldn’t access any of my characters. I play exclusively in offline mode and don’t plan to change that. All my characters are offline ones and they are still “there”, but no matter which one I select, if I press the big purple “ENTER GAME” button, nothing happens.
Trying to create a new character simply hangs the game and it then needs to be forcefully shut down.
I am desperate. I tried everything from a new install, to installing in a different partition, to God knows what else. The Discord was no help either (it’s like no one else had this issue).

For context: playing online works, but that means losing every single item I grinded and crafted, all my stash tabs, gold, etc. - not a great prospect. I’m willing to start a new character in offline mode, but at the moment it just hangs - what options do I have?

Does this at all sound familiar to anyone? If so, what can I possibly do to play again?

Edit: 3hours and not a single reply…

Thanks!

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ANYONE?! HELLO? IS ANYBODY IN THERE?!
JUST KNOCK IF YOU CAN HEAR ME!

She sells sea shells by the sea shore.

ANYONE?!

PRETTY PLEASE?!

MY DEAR GOD, CAN ANYONE HELP AT ALL?!

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a boy wanted to play his offline characters in Last Epoch…

Hi there!

So I might have a fix. I had the same problem with not being able to play offline chars. Online also, but I guess you don’t bother with that.

Here is a link to my topic:
https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/i-cannot-play-offline-nor-online-after-bsod/63829

I looked at first for stuff with BSOD in the title and didn’t get anything. Turns out this guy Mieu solved something similar here:
https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/cannot-load-any-offline-character-tried-everything/59993/4

This differs from my case a bit. I couldn’t find any errors or exceptions in my files so I switched one file after another that I had .bak version of. For me, it was a file “STASH_CYCLE_2_0”.

I will try to write a clear instruction of what I did and what I think should help. I want to point out, that I’m not taking responsibility for any stuff going wrong here. If you replace a wrong file and not keep a copy, you might loose some items. I didn’t really have that much so I didn’t care, but also in the end I got everything back anyway.

  1. On Steam, in properties for Last Epoch, disable the option “Keep games saves in the Steam Cloud for Last Epoch”
  2. Make a copy of your saves folder:
    C:\Users\Your_user_name\AppData\LocalLow\Eleventh Hour Games\Last Epoch\Saves
    Lets refer to this one as the Unchanged Backup folder. Don’t ever change anything in this folder.
  3. Make another copy of the same folder. Lets refer to this one as the Restored Backup folder
  4. In the Restored Backup folder delete all of the files that are NOT .bak files. Then remove the “.bak” extension from the files that are left. For me this left 12 files.
  5. Now move the first file from Restored Backup folder to the original saves folder.
  6. Launch Last Epoch and check if you can play normally. If you can - great! Move to step 9.
  7. If it still doesn’t work, get the original version of the file from Unchanged Backup folder and put it in the original saves folder.
  8. Repeat from step 5 until you check all of the files. If after the last file the game still doesn’t work I’m sorry, I hoped that was it :frowning:
  9. You can enable again the steam cloud saves option. If the game was fixed, you should choose “local save” option when starting the game. If the game wasn’t fixed I guess it doesn’t mater, probably won’t even ask anything.

Let me know of course if this works, I hope it does.

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Wow, someone actually replied. Don’t mean to sound ungrateful, I was just very skeptical.

Okay, I can’t say I’ve tried that, but it sounds convoluted enough to work. Though, it’s 3 A.M. for me, so I can’t test that right now. I’ll make sure to have a look and provide you with feedback.

Whether this works or not, I truly appreciate you taking the time to write all that!

Cheers!

Yeah, I tried to write a very safe universal instruction, but it kept growing in steps.
Since the .bak files are backup files, you want to use the backup instead of the (hopefully) one corrupted file. You can upload packed “saves” folder and I can take a look if you want. Maybe I can see which file looks bad, so you’ll only have to check that one. In my case it wasn’t obvious, so I went file by file.

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This worked for me! Thank you so much. It was my latest character, so thankfully I only needed to do the .bak thingy once. :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart:

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First off, though the solution wasn’t exactly what you described, making a separate folder and changing those .bak files helped, since I had to copy-paste everything and turn the "Keep games saves in the Steam Cloud for Last Epoch” option on and off again - which, I believe, was truly what worked.

Regardless - thank you SO much for your help! I don’t know how to repay you!

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