Keep losing my progress :(

[Pixelar]

Alright so this has happened twice but it's really annoying.

So basically what happens is when I load up the game to play again it will have me back at Startington with no quests etc.
I will still have all my gear but I will have to do every boss/quest again.

I got up to the end of the current beta yesterday and I went to finish off some things today and I was back at Startington, this means I will have to do every boss/quest again.
If someone could please give me a reason and a way to prevent this I will be very thankful

Thanks, Pixelar.

 

[MrChocodemon]

Do you play over Steam?
Yes -> you should look into steam settings and maybe activate deactivate "cloud saves" for this game
No/Yes, but cloud saves didn't help -> Maybe the folder and/or subfolders for saving progress are read-only. You can find them if you enter %appdata% in the search, folder path window, or execute window or you can follow this path.

C:\Users\"InsertUserNameHere"\AppData\Roaming\Secrets of Grindea

Those will lead into the C:\Users\"InsertUserNameHere"\AppData\Roaming folder where you can find the folders which are used to store the game progress.

I hope this helps, if not, you know where you find us. (If you want faster responses you can also ask in the discord chat.)
https://discord.gg/JhvuzPw





@Teddy would it possible to make a folder check to see if it is read only? Something like this LINK TO PICTURE where Valve detects certain windows settings and lets the player know.

 

[Teddy]

@MrChocodemon made a great response, but you should actually turn off cloud saving as it's likely a bug in the cloud saves causing the issue! (I edited that bit in your post for clarity, hope you don't mind!)

If by turning off the cloud saves you can now progress through the game and it gets saved, you can follow these steps to potentially restore a backup of your world save:

In the file explorer, go into %APPDATA%/Secrets of Grindea and find the Backups folder. In here you should see folders named after all your characters. Go into the appropriate folder. The auto 0-4 are rolling backups. Sort the folder by date to easily see which of them was made last! The “005h” and alike are permanent backups made every hour.

Choose a backup you think is appropriate, and copy it to the “Worlds” folder. Replace the save file of the slot you want to recover by deleting its save and renaming the copied backup to the correct slot. The 0 save file corresponds to your first save slot, 1 to the second, and so forth.

 

[KoBeWi]

How does Steam Cloud actually work? Does it allow you to choose what and how is synchronized, or you just set files and Steam has it's own way to manage it? Because if the former, that sound like a game bug, not Steam problem.

 

[MrChocodemon]

How does Steam Cloud actually work? Does it allow you to choose what and how is synchronized, or you just set files and Steam has it's own way to manage it? Because if the former, that sound like a game bug, not Steam problem.

Steam updates the cloud when you make a new save. But if you start the game and a newer save is detected in the cloud, then you are asked which is the one that should be kept. So in case you might not have the newest save, steam asks if everything is like you want it to be. (Or that is the theory of it)

 

[KoBeWi]

To me, Steam should just check if same-named file already exists in Cloud and let the game developer handle the conflicts. If you have some file A and same file B in Cloud, you should have access to both, to compare their actual progress and keep the one with further progress or even merge them. Or you start a game and save in Cloud, but then start another game offline on another machine, and than go online on that machine, you should be able to move the conflicting save to other, free slot.

The situation when Steam overwrites your saves in a wrong way without warning is just unacceptable.

 

[Teddy]

As a developer you tell Steam what file extensions to back up, in what folders, and then Steam "does the job for you". There is no game code involved in this - it's done inside the Steamworks developer portal.

What happens in this bug is that sometimes, at random, a world save file is targeted for deletion by the cloud system, permanently.

I have reported the problem but never got a reply. Who knows, maybe it's some extremely rare bug that's caused by something I can't guess without seeing their source code (a file path creating a hash that the system can't handle due to some weird edge case, etc). I know the feeling when someone reports a very arbitrary bug that's impossible to reproduce.

We're weighing our options a bit on this... I could ditch Steam AutoCloud and try to implement their old legacy system inside the game code, and maybe that way get more control and perhaps do redundancy checks to prevent this particular bug. This might not work though - perhaps with an ideal implementation the game will just mimic AutoCloud and lead to the exact same issues.

Or I could implement a check for this bug despite using AutoCloud, where it is assumed that someone deleting just the world save didn't actually want that, and giving instructions to the user how to disable Steam Cloud or delete the broken Steam-file. Not the most elegant solution, but...

 

[KoBeWi]

Well, maybe a solution would be to have a shadow copy of each save that doesn't get synced into Cloud (i.e. save game twice and sync only one save file), and then detect if something gets messed up and somehow replace the file? Maybe there's a trick to cheat Steam that the file you just recovered is a completely new one, so it won't get deleted again.

 

[Teddy]

Steam manages files by file path, so no, I can't do anything like that. If I could trick the system by creating new files, it would be tricked now - a brand new, unique save file is after all created when afflicted players start the game!

Edit: I should probably clarify that option B would assume that one would never willingly delete a world save file and automatically restore them using the existing backup system, while informing the user that Steam Cloud is bugged and how to get it fixed