Valheim – How to Retrieve Corrupted Characters and Worlds

How to Retrieve Corrupted Characters and Worlds

Note: Credit goes to Skippy

Do you want to back up your save? Maybe your character or world (or maybe both) got corrupted from a crash? Don’t worry, there’s still hope! As we all know the game is still in EA and can have some major game breaking bugs. After losing a character and world 50 hours in, I found out the game makes an extra backup save of both your worlds and characters. Here’s what to do if your save gets corrupted:

The character and world file location is in:

• AppData/LocalLow/IronGate/Valheim

(Press windows key and type %appdata% to get to AppData)

If you look in Valheim/Characters, you will see CharacterName.fch and CharacterName.fch.old

If your character file gets corrupted, CharacterName.fch will be the corrupted file, however CharacterName.fch.old has a slightly older version of your character. What you want to do in this case is BACK THESE FILES UP FIRST. Then delete CharacterName.fch and rename CharacterName.fch.old to CharacterName.fch . You got your character back!

Now for worlds, go to Valheim/worlds. You will see 4 files for each world:

• WorldName
• WorldName.db.old
• WorldName.fwl
• WorldName.fwl.old

You will follow the same process here. Back up these files first, then delete WorldName and WorldName.fwl

Rename WorldName.db.old to WorldName (you’re just removing db.old) and rename WorldName.fwl.old to WorldName.fwl

Keep your saves backed up at all times, the game is still buggy and you could lose all progress from a simple crash.

Important: This way may NOT work if you decide to play a corrupted character or world for a long time after it got corrupted, as the game overwrites the backup files automatically after a set amount of time.