How do I restore a saved game in Don't Starve?

I hate to ask a stupid question, but, I just started playing Don't Starve this evening. I know the game saves every time a day passes, but when I die I have not seen any option for restoring that saved progress.

Why does the game save progress if you can't restore it? Is that just so you can quit the game and pick up close to where you left off?

3 Answers

Don't Starve uses the permadeath system commonly seen in traditional rogue-likes such as nethack - when your character dies, the save is deleted automatically. Of course, there are ways to escape death...

Through the use of Life Giving Amulets, Touch Stones or Meat Effigies

... but otherwise death is permanent. The game saves every game day to make sure you don't lose your progress if the game crashes, and also to ensure you can't cheat by reverting to a previous save.

To explain further what Ice is saying, here is how to rollback to a given backup file:

First, you need to locate your saved files. Mines are in Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\31706488\219740\remote... but if you go in your steam folder, you can search for survival_1 file.

Survival_1 is your game in the first game slot, Survival_2 second slot and so on..
saveindex is where the game validates the Survival files when you try to load your game.

So, what needs to be done is to backup both saveindex and survival files. You can do it everyday.. once in a while.. whenever you want to be able to rollback to this point.

Whenever you die, you need to restore both files again. Be careful to backup all your files if you play multiple games at the same time.

Hope this helps!

There is a way to cheat "death." The save file is located in the Steam folder. It's kind of comlicated to explain how to find it, but you can google it by typing "don't starve save game location" in the Search bar and look for one that gives you the best answer. Once you find it you can copy it and change the name of the copied file to something the game won't recognize. For example: savegame1(copy).sav, the game will not see that file and will not delete it. Simple.

Although, you may need to copy the original file again since it auto-saves. I recommend doing that when you are finished playing or if you are worried that your character will die. Also, if you die your original file will be deleted as mentioned above. Just change the name of your copied file by deleting the (copy) part and your game will continue from that point. You will need to backup that file as well, as it will be deleted also if you die and you will be left with no save file. In short, you will need to keep copying the newest save file.