Recovering Lost Characters

This handy guide was originally written by TanzNukeTerror!

Computer crash, power outage, or otherwise unexpected shutdown of your computer in the middle of playing Starbound? Character not showing up in your player menu after such an event? In cases like this, you might have a…

Corrupt character!
Oh no! That’s unfortunate! What do I do? Is there any way to restore it?

Fear not, important individual! There are indeed steps you can take to restore your beautiful character, and their ship, from an automatic backup! Just follow these steps carefully, and you’ll be chasing Poptops and catching Fawnflies in no-time!

Step 1: Find your player folder.

  • Right-click “Starbound” in your Steam library (Or “Starbound – Unstable” if you’re using Unstable or Nightly)
  • Click “properties”
  • Click “local files”
  • Click “browse local files”
  • Go into “storage”. Your “player” folder should be there.

Step 2: Back up your player folder.
This will create a backup of all files inside your player folder, just in case something goes wrong in step 3.

  • Copy the folder
  • Paste the folder elsewhere (For example: On your desktop.)

Step 3: Restore from a backup:
This assumes your corrupt character was the most recent one you’ve accessed. If that is not the case, and you’ve used one or two characters after that, then the files you want will be one or two jumbles further down.

Sort by date accessed, and the most recent one should be the first one. These files will be jumbles of letters and numbers. (Which I will refer to as [jumble] from here on.)

For example:

ab08803dbcb4173747d4d93bbeef65df.player
ab08803dbcb4173747d4d93bbeef65df.shipworld
ab08803dbcb4173747d4d93bbeef65df.player.bak1
ab08803dbcb4173747d4d93bbeef65df.shipworld.bak1

  • Rename [jumble].player.bak1 and [jumble].shipworld.bak1 to [jumble].player and [jumble].shipworld
  • Delete [jumble].player and [jumble].shipworld

Note: Do not actually change the jumble of letters and numbers, to [jumble]. Leave them alone, and only change the stuff after the dot.

“This didn’t work! My character still doesn’t show up!”

  • Repeat the second-last part of step 3, and then the last part with [jumble].player.bak2 and [jumble].shipworld.bak2
  • If that still doesn’t work, try with [jumble].player.bak3 and [jumble].shipworld.bak3