OK, it’s been a couple of weeks since I posted. That’s partly down to family life and teething children sapping my will to live energy but mostly down to Minecraft. back in the pre-beta days I was pretty addicted to it but once the map I’d invested all my time in became increasingly incompatible with the game I drifted away from it more and more, and until recently I hadn’t in a couple of years.
Until I heard of Captive Minecraft.
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The Oculus Rift is one of the more exciting things to happen to gaming in a while. Forget 4K displays, 3D monitors and next-gen consoles – consumer-grade virtual reality headsets that aren’t rubbish are actually on the horizon. Future!
And now Facebook have bought Oculus for $2 billion in cash and stocks. That leaves me conflicted. On the one hand, Facebook are doing very clever things with hardware these days and their devotion to improving the state of technology and computing is beyond question.
It’s on the social and personal level that the misgivings begin – Facebook not exactly known for being privacy- or user oriented. The most visible fallout of the announcement so far has been Notch’s decision to end talks to bring Minecraft to Oculus because “Facebook creeps me out”. We’ll surely hear more of this sort of thing over the coming weeks, as well as the secondary fallout among fans.
Honestly, I think this is a good thing for Oculus – facebook will bring them a level of hardware expertise and resources that should open up whole new vistas of potential, and hopefully with John Carmack as CTO Oculus will be able to avoid wandering too far down the Facebook rabbit hole. The move is obviously going to cost Oculus goodwill among it’s early supporters – the set of people who mistrust Facebook overlaps pretty heavily with the sort of tech enthusiast who gets excited about new technology like the Rift. Yes, Facebook comes with it’s own marketing platform and immense user-base which will more than cancel that out, but I’m sure a lot of folks will see the deal as a betrayal.
Me, I’m cautiously optimistic that Oculus gets the “Facebook technology” treatment rather than the “Facebook social” treatment. In the meantime, no Minecraft on the Rift. Boo!
Today’s soundtrack is an odd one – I’ve never played the game, but have used the album extensively as the soundtrack to a completely different game. Introducing Josh Whelchel’s score for The Spirit Engine 2 – my unofficial soundtrack to Minecraft.
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A Minecraft addiction seems to be this year’s must-have psychosis, and I jumped on that bandwagon with gusto. Earlier today, thanks to a combination of a loose power cable and wildly flailing feet I managed to switch off my computer several hours into playing Minecraft. No harm done, switch the computer on, reload Minecraft, click on “World 2″… no World 2.
A lot of time has gone into World 2. I’ve made bases, sculptures, gardens, forests, mines and towers. A lot of time.
I could accept losing several hours of progress, but for the world to be gone completely? No. The files were still there, but level.dat and level.dat _old were corrupt. The internet informed me that with a bit of trickery I could get the world working again by dropping the data into a different world, but there would be… issues.
And here is where Windows comes to the rescue. While I tend to back my stuff up at irregular intervals, relying on Dropbox for my important stuff, I’m essentially terrible at it. Windows, bless its unsung soul, has been doing it for me, and I never even knew.
If you’ve managed to corrupt your world, right click on level.dat, go to properties, then to the “Previous Versions” tab. If the winds are right, you’ll have a bunch of versions you can restore to – thankfully Windows had one made yesterday with a System Restore Point. Restore that version, reload Minecraft…
And voila, World 2 was back. Sure, I’d lost a couple of hours of work (but not as much as I thought), and my inventory had gone back to yesterday, but World 2 lives!
Thank you Microsoft, for your Minecraft autobackup feature.
tldr; You can fix corrupted Minecraft saves by using Windows’ “Previous Versions” feature – since the Minecraft data is in your AppData folder, it gets backed up automatically when restore points are made.