If you’re enjoying the Nordic-inspired landscapes of Valheim, be careful, a bug is eating up some people’s worlds. Developer Iron Gate is working on a solution, but it’s having some trouble.
The glitch is a catastrophic one – you boot up, only to find your entire save is gone, replaced by a loading error. Going by posts on the survival game‘s subreddit, it seems to have become more common after the latest update. Some players are reporting an error message when they try to log in that seems to have no workaround. One tried clearing out .old files, a fix for some earlier wrinkles, and doing all the standard stuff like restarting their machine, running as administrator and so on, and nothing.
Richard Svensson, CEO of developer Iron Gate, tweeted out a PSA on the bug, and stated the team hasn’t been able to replicate it, meaning a fix is difficult at the moment. “If you are playing Valheim this weekend, please backup your world and characters. The evil world-destroyer bug is still roaming free,” he said, adding that the only tidbit the devs have is that it appears to become more likely if you alt-F4 out of the viking game, so try to remember to go into the menu and exit manually instead.
Backing up all your data is as easy as going to C:\Users\Username\AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim, and copying all your world and character files. It’s not ideal, but at least if your progress succumbs to the void, you’ll have a way of putting it back.
Its en evil bug, that we have yet to be able to reproduce even once :(. It seems to occur more often if you exit the game by ALT+F4, so try to use menu->exit instead.
— Richard Svensson (@dvoidis) February 12, 2021
If you have issues or insight, the official Discord is a good place to chat to other players and the developers. Our Valheim building guide and Valheim progression guide will see you make Odin proud in your escapades.