The Contents of a Save

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The Contents of a Save
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This guide is intended to give you some basic information about what is inside of your saves. This information can be useful for a lot of reasons: restoring backups, changing world settings, editing or deleting player information, or anything else you can think of. Some extreme examples include adding planets, adding or removing grids, and modifying grids and inventories. These extreme examples won't be covered here but the information provided should help with the more reasonable ones.

Version: 0.6

Location

Path to saves

All Medieval Engineers saved data can be found inside of the AppData folder. By default this path is C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\MedievalEngineers\. This path has a Windows shortcut of %appdata%\MedievalEngineers. This folder contains Blueprints, Maps, Mods, Saves, Screenshots, ShaderCache, Storage (used by mods), Workshop Worlds, Controls configuration (key bindings), Interface configuration (used by the general search screen for now), MedievalEngineers configuration, MedievalEngineers log, VRageRender-DirectX11 log. The Saves folder is of primary interest to this guide. Inside the Saves folder you will find numbered folders that correspond to each Steam account that has been used to play Medieval Engineers on your PC. Each sub-folder of these account folders is what we refer to as a save.

Folders and Files

Inside each save folder you will find the following:

Type Name Description
Folder Backup Contains backup saves. Each backup is a full copy of the save from an earlier state. These saves are identical in structure with the exception of not having their own backup folder.
Folder Players Contains .player files. These files have information that is specific to each player who has joined the world. They are named by Steam ID.
.vx2 File(s) Voxel Modifications This is generally one file, the planet, however the option exists to have multiple files if other bodies are added. vx2 files are compressed binary files that contain changes to the voxels. Planets are generated from maps in the game files specified by the scenario, modified by the scenario if needed, and then modified by the save.
.sbc File Configuration The configuration file contains all of the settings for the world such as those specified in world settings and advanced world settings. Also contained is version information, player identities (Steam ID to character ID mapping), and general session information.
.sbs Save Data This file contains all information about the save that is not in any of the other files. This contains all bot information, session components, Houses/ranks/deplomacy, banners, decay, fast travel cooldowns, farmables, access keys, areas, spawn information, and every entity (item, grid, character) in the world.
.jpg Thumbnail A screenshot that is generated when the world is saved. This is automatically scaled to reduce file size.

Players

Each of these files contains all information relevant to a single player in the world. Not all information generated by the player is saved in this file. What is included in the file is actually determined by the game architecture in that any entity component used by the character will serialize data to this file.

Backups

This folder contains backups of the save.

In Advanced World Settings there is a slider that sets the Maximum backup saves for the world. Backups are maintained when the game is saving using the following process.

  • Existing backups are deleted, in oldest to newest order, until the total number is 1 less than the maximum backup saves. So if the maximum backup saves is set to 3, the game will delete backups until there are only 2.
  • The current save is copied to the backup folder and named with the date and time. This increases the number of backups to the target specified in the Maximum backup saves setting.
  • The new save is generated and copied over the current save.

Thumbnail

thumb.jpg is a screenshot captured by the active camera when the world is saved. This file is not created by dedicated servers because the server has no active camera and no rendering at all.

Configuration

Save

Voxels

.vx2 files are compressed binary exports of voxel changes (deltas). There is no easy way to edit these files.