Lost my character...? (AVWW1)

[johnki]

So yesterday I bought AVWW1+2 in the sale on Steam. I played AVWW1 first and played for two hours before giving AVWW2 a lesser run.

Today, I went to load my world up and it asked me to back it up, to which I said yes. When I loaded it up, my hotkeys were all out of place so I fixed them. Then I realized I couldn't cast any of my spells because I didn't have enough mana. So I checked and my character had a different name and was not the character I had started with.

It's not like it didn't save. Everything else seems to have loaded correctly. Just not the character that I had already put two hours into. :/

[x4000]

If all your hotkeys were off and so on, it sounds like your settings file got corrupted somehow. If you then loaded with a different network name, that would cause you to load a new character rather than having your old one. This is a useful feature so that two people can play on the same world with one serial number, however it can cause confusion in cases like this where a settings file gets reset. If you remember what your username was, just set that again in the network tab of the settings menu and you should be all set. If you don't remember, you can post your world folder in a zip file and we can look that up for you.

Hope that helps!

[johnki]

My network name is the same as the one I started with and I tried changing it, to which it asked if I wanted to load the original or start a new one. Loading the original did not give back my original character.

EDIT: World file.

[x4000]

Well, you're definitely right -- I can confirm there is only one account on there.  Did you still have all the spells and such when you loaded up the world when the characters changed?  Presumably so -- all of that is in one central file, so it would be about impossible to lose that while still having the rest of the world actually functional at all.

My best guess at this point is that most likely your old character had died somehow and when you reloaded it had you choose a new one.  Not sure how that would not have been noticed (choosing a new character), but again all that stuff is in one central file in the world folder, so it's really not possible to lose part of it while still having the rest not be corrupt also (the same is not true of the individual chunks or regions, which are discrete files that can be safely lost without affecting the central world index at all).

As long as you have your items and so forth, really there's not a whole lot of loss here: characters die all the time in Valley 1, and that's actually something that it warns you about from the start.  Keeping one going for 2 hours is a bit above average; often characters seem to last more like 15-45 minutes or so.  Valley 2 is different in that you play as a single character for the entire time, but in Valley 1 permadeath is staring you down the whole time.

I wish I had a better answer on what happened to your original character, but it doesn't have a log of that sort of thing.

Correction: it does have a log in the form of the continent events, which are in the game itself.  I was thinking of the sort of logging that Valley 2 does in the world folder.  When I look in the continent events log under the continent status section of the planning menu, all I see is one mission completed, and no deaths.  I really don't see a way for the character to have changed, under those circumstances; the character didn't die, there's not a second profile, it seems like you don't recall selecting a different character... I am wondering if perhaps you've loaded the wrong world somehow?  I'm grasping at straws a bit here, because I just don't see anything that would indicate to me that a character has disappeared at all, just looking at the world file itself. 

[johnki]

Correction: it does have a log in the form of the continent events, which are in the game itself.  I was thinking of the sort of logging that Valley 2 does in the world folder.  When I look in the continent events log under the continent status section of the planning menu, all I see is one mission completed, and no deaths.  I really don't see a way for the character to have changed, under those circumstances; the character didn't die, there's not a second profile, it seems like you don't recall selecting a different character... I am wondering if perhaps you've loaded the wrong world somehow?  I'm grasping at straws a bit here, because I just don't see anything that would indicate to me that a character has disappeared at all, just looking at the world file itself. 

Man, that's concerning. :/ I can say with 100% certainty that it's not the same character though. My original character had 250 mana, this one has 100. My original character shared a first-name-only name with my network name, this one has a randomly generated name.

I can also say with 100% certainty that it is the correct world. I only have one right now.

I guess I just start a new world and hope it doesn't happen again? Should I submit a bug report?

[x4000]

Well, a bug report really wouldn't accomplish much, as I'd be the one fixing the bug and really I have nothing to go on at the moment.  We've sold north of 40,000 copies of the game, and this is the first report I have ever heard of this nature, literally.  I just don't know how this would happen.  Since you said you'd been backing up the game, you might look at the backups and see if one of those has your character so you can just restore from there.  These are in the WorldBackups folder inside your RuntimeData folder.  You can just copy them into your Worlds folder to restore them and see which one has what you want.  Then you can rename that as you like.

Really it sounds like your character died, but I'm not sure why there's not a dead-character entry in there.  And you probably would have noticed having to select another character again, which is a key part of what happens when your character dies.  So it really is a mystery, but I'm not sure what would cause it and there's not much I can do without something more to go on.

What strikes me is the rarity of this occurrence is a bit fishy.  We have had a few other really-odd bugs that one person encountered, and generally those were because of them using something like Dropbox or similar to do a sync with multiple computers on the Worlds folder.  In that case, sometimes the game would write to the folder, and Dropbox would mess with the file in the middle of the write and cause oddities.  Usually that was full corruption or an error with the write not succeeding at all, though.  Is there anything like that running on this folder to your knowledge?  Antivirus or anti-spyware programs couldn't cause something like this, so those are ruled out.  It would have to be something monitoring the file system on this folder and making syncs or other changes.

Beyond that... I'm not usually at a loss for a solution, but this one has me stumped.

[johnki]

Beyond that... I'm not usually at a loss for a solution, but this one has me stumped.

No Dropbox folders. No antiviruses.

I am sure that my character didn't die, as well, as I quit playing in the settlement.

HOWEVER, I opened the backup (without backing it up this time) and the character was still there. WOO!

Not sure what happened but it's odd that the backup contained the character when the original save didn't.

[x4000]

Well, very odd still, but I'm really glad the backup worked out for you!