200+ hours in. Love this game! Tiny little problem today…
TL;DR: At least for 0.7.7f, periodically backup the file named Epoch_Local_Global_Data_Beta in C:\Users\AppData\LocalLow\Eleventh Hour Games\Last Epoch\Saves to be sure you don’t lose your stash.
After a crash earlier I lost all stash items and gold. Characters and their local inventories remained intact though. Had some nice items that took a while to collect so I decided to try some things to recover. Was eventually able to get back to an earlier version of my stash! Still missing some prime loot but at least it’s not a total loss.
Building new reaper and BOOM crash. Whole PC. Game is beta and this has happened a few times before so no biggie. I get rebooted and log back in, check my character and see my items in local inventory so I go run a Mono. Afterward, I want to put items in stash and notice it’s empty. Gold gone as well.
Immediately have a Wolcen flashback and get stressed, but then I remember Last Epoch is a legit game and I start looking for fixes. Verified game files via Steam, then downloaded game files from Steam Cloud but still no stash. Recovered local Last Epoch registry data from 4 days ago and compared to post-crash export of the same key. Different, but only in session IDs. Tried it anyway but loading older registry data did not have an impact on missing stash.
Next, deleted all files from C:\Users\AppData\LocalLow\Eleventh Hour Games\Last Epoch\Saves and ran again with most current registry data. This resulted in only 5 of my 7 current characters being available. Logged in and saw that my stash had come back, albeit a very old version of it. Lost things from the most recent couple of patches, but about 2/3 recovered overall. Added the new characters back into my user directory and they were available again. Then to test, copied the Epoch_Local_Global_Data_Beta file in and my stash vaporized. Problem found.
From here I could play, but wanted to see if there was anything worth checking out in the older reg data. Looking at Epoch_Local_Global_Data_Beta it is fairly easy to understand and I can see that most of my recent file got corrupted. I could also see similar data in the reg key Epoch_Local_Global_Data_Beta_h3873769360. After a Hex -> String conversion I could read the contents of the reg file so saved that into a new Epoch_Local_Global_Data_Beta. This resulted in the same, older version of my stash.
Seems there have been some changes in the recent patches about where local data is stored. Registry has stale data (from a few patches ago?) and now it looks like the only place that data is recorded is the one single file. Even with Steam Cloud enabled the file can be overwritten with trash data fairly easily. Loss of this file means loss of stash, but if you have a recent backup you can simply drop it back in the correct folder to recover.