A Way To Recover Old Characters

UPDATE: This does not completely work, as there are issues with the star map! If you complete this process you will be able to open and use old characters, but you will not be able to open your ships navigation, so you will be stuck where you are! Better just make some new characters!

So, there are enough posts on the forum complaining about character resets, but it's a beta, so that's expected. However, that said, I may have found a way to recover old character files, and it's ridiculously easy.

First, character files are NOT DELETED on update! The files have an identifier in them that says the version of the file. All old files still exist, but are simply IGNORED by new versions of the game.

So I simply told the game that the file was a new one:

1. Open your Starbound "player" folder. Normally this is "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Starbound\player\".
2. The player files are named random strings. Each player actually has 3 FILES. Find the ".player" file for your character. The actual name of the character is only a little bit into the file, so if you have multiple characters just open the ".player" files one at a time until you see the name of the character you want.
3. See at the beginning of the file it says "SBPFV1"? That stands for "StarBound Player File Version 1". Change it to "SBPFV1.1" and save the file.

This simple addition of ".1" in the character files has allowed me to successfully open my characters in the new version. Do note that there is a reason why they didn't just keep the files the same. Weapons may be screwed up, as they changed the damage system and all, so you may want to throw out old weapons to avoid issues. There may be other, unforeseen consequences of opening files in this way.

I'm curious whether this works with all character files or if there are any instances in which it wouldn't work, so please try it out and post your findings.

I use Notepad++ to edit my files: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/

Good luck!
- gfrung4

 

I'm curious to see if anyone will be able to resurrect a 1st generation beta character when the game launches, and if there will be any um.... abnormalities with them.

 

fk my old charakter. my new one got a several thousand dps 1handed legacy weapon. \o/

 

It completely works, I just didn't want to perpetuate it >.>

 

i just tested it and all old weapons are now "perfctly generic item" the sprite is a green block and the discription is "a perfectly generic item. maybe a little bit too perfect..."

so weapons (melee.not guns) got "removed" in my file =)

also i have 500 armor/energy/hp? seems a little bit too much for armor and energy lol

 

Randomly generated weapons likely, crafted weapons should not have been effected?

Edit: Well they sould be modified to different values, but not turned to cubes.

 

I wondered if this sort of thing was possible before the reset, and I figured it was when I first noticed it didn't dump old character files after the reset, I just haven't been assed to try

It reasons this would work though. Even if they did wipe character files, you could back up your old files before a wipe and alter them to the new format after an update. Because things are client side, there's little they can do to prevent this.

Something worth noting is that it should also, in theory, be possible to stash everything on your character in chests, and then fly to the coordinates of that planet on your new character, as from what I've seen it doesn't do anything to wipe world files. Haven't tried it, though.

 

Quite interesting. Makes me want to try it out this week and see what wacky numbers pop up.

 

they didnt got wiped. the game just cant read them so you just need to open up your folder and there they are.

also: i lost my progress/ship on that charakter. only quests and books seem to have carryd over. brb testing crafting recipees

 

i also noticed that my game crashes when entering the starmap....probably because i was on a gammar sector planet that
1 doesnt exists in the new seed OR
2 the entire sector id thingy got rewritten and it doesnt know what to do.

so i gotta figure out a way of changing my location now

 

So far I've been able to get my character back, but as soon as I try to access my ship's console, the game crashes. Is the player file the only one you added the ' .1 ' to? or are we supposed to edit the metafile and shipworld as well?

 

Didn't work for me, not sure if it's because my first page is already full of characters, but if I hit the scroll down arrow once I get the create character option, if I hit it again my game crashes.

 

thats what i just said. im trying to copy the shiplocation of one of my new charakters. brb when i managed to do it

 

Only the player file.

I believe the issue the game is having is the sector doesn't exist. There is a reason the devs didn't include a way for us to keep out characters but if you *REALLY* badly want to keep them, well I have an untested solution. But give me a good reason why you want to keep them?

 

Actually, if you do manage to find a way to solve this and make it so you could redeem your character, I am sure the devs would love to know how and possible make a way for people to revert there characters to the newest patch.

 

update: changed the name of my new charakters metadata/shipworld to the name of my old charakters file thus alowing me to get in the ship of my new charakter with my old charakter!
but the location of the old charakter (starmap) really seems to be written in the player file

anyway. testing new things =)

 

If the devs truly wanted that, they could have very easily come up with a solution.

You're correct that character location is saved in player data.

 

To be fair, maybe they didn't think about creating this because they were in the process of fixing bigger issues?

 

ofc they wanted us to make new charakters to test out everything from point 0

thats the purpose of a new beta balance patch wipe

 

I just want my ship back mostly, and the character that I revived seems to have all the recipes in the 3D printer intact. I couldn't care less about my high tier weapons.