As of February 14th, Valheim developer Iron Gate is advising all players to backup their characters and worlds as much as they can after discovering what they have dubbed the “world-destroyer” bug is resetting progress and causing world/data loss.
In a tweet by Iron Gate CEO Richard Svensson explained how players can make backups and avoid losing their data to the bug, confirming that despite trying to reproduce it and address the glitch, the team hasn’t yet been able to do so or figure out while it’s happening however with 1000’s of people out there complaining about the issue, on their local machine, with a hosting company or other solution. Iron Gate have stated that they suspect it may be connected to exiting the gaming by ALT+F4 and not via the menu however this has not been validated with any merit.
“If you are playing Valheim this weekend, please backup your world and characters,” Svensson said. “The evil world-destroyer bug is still roaming free =(.
“It’s an 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.”
To make a backup, Svensson advises you head to a folder on your windows based computer; “C:\Users\Username\AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\” and copy the files elsewhere to backup, apparently this might also help with a hosted solution too.
Valheim has sold over 1 million copies in just a week and for these issues to exist and persist on launch it makes the company look amateurish at best, despite it being early access, we’ve not heard of a game having data loss issues this bad. The Viking-themed survival and crafting game launched as an Early Access title on 2nd February, and quickly rose to the upper echelons of Steam and Twitch. It hit a peak of 160,000 concurrent users on Steam, and had over 127,000 peak viewers on Twitch during its first week on sale.
