Spore – Recovering from a bad saved game.
If like me you have been blessed with Spore’s excellent saved game feature of giving you only one saved game. Then only to find at some stage become stuck with a broken saved game, where by it crashes every time you load it. There is some hope.
- Go find your Spore’s saved games. It should be located in your applications directory.
eg. C:\Documents and Settings\<<USERNAME>>\Application Data\SPORE\Games
- There should be a folder called Game0 (or similarly otherwise) as well as a folder Games0.old (again similarly otherwise). Copy the folder Game0 to a spare location, as backup in case it doesn’t work.
- Open the .old folder of the relating saved game you’ve just backed up.
- Copy all the contents of this folder into the normal folder (eg. Games0) and overwrite all the files in there.
- Load up and Spore, and check out when you saved your game previously.
Of course this may not work for everyone. Also it’s somewhat dependent on your saving habits.
Best of luck. Or not.
UPDATE: If you can’t find your “Application Data” folder. Go up to your menubar and go Tools -> Folder Options. From there go to the View tab. Go down and look for the Hidden files and folders option. And select “Show hidden files and folders” from the radio buttons. That should then make the hidden “Application Data” folder visible.
Gaming | jort | 8 September, 2008
bad saved game, broken saved game, bug, corrupted, crash, fix, spore
Hey,thanks man,had a problem when i quit last time,when i tried to re-enter, gave me an error,that windows “send report”..then i renamed the game0 folder to test, and it started,a i get pised..triet this method of yours and works like a charm,thanks again
No problems, glad to hear it’s helping people.
Have an error where my saved planet was no longer appearing. I looked and the files are still there. No help has been forthcoming as of yet from EA/Maxis. So, I archived the entire SPORE folder there and let Spore generate a new one. Now it works fine again, but I’d like to recover my pld planet and put it in with the new one I started. Any idea how?
Mixing old and new data is a bit tricky, and would probably require a fair bit of fiddling of the saved games to get it working.
Having a quick look through the data files it won’t be easy as I’m assuming the data is encoded in some manner.
Quite possibly you could mix and match saved game files of the .spo, .pkp, .pkt and .pld files of the old with the new folder. As usual though I have no idea if this would work and backup your stuff before trying it out. Let us know if anything does come up. Not the first person to ask me about it.
that’s what i can read on most spore forums, but it didn’t work for me. but compared to people who got an error message (because i could save everytime and play easily), i got nothing. i just ran the game one day after another, and suddenly my savegames weren’t on the start screen anymore. o_O”
Makes you wonder how a veteran game company could make such a crucial mistake on something so important. Given it’s essentially impossible to ‘lose’ in the game, it’s not really making it more difficult – just annoying.
I have this issue too. I play, save a game (and planet), log, come back, only ‘new game’ planets show in the galaxy. My game/planet is nowhere to be found. Plus I don’t have that folder jort is naming above. I don’t have an ‘application data’ folder. I’m running Windows XP with service pack 2. Everything about my system is normal. Spore runs normal, just no saved games. Completely bummed.
P.S. I DO have a Spore folder under My Documents called ‘My Spore Creations’ which contains the two creatures i’ve built .. but no saved game. No Game0 folder anywhere. I’ve searched my internal and external hard discs.
Thanks – saved my progress!
If you can’t find your Application Data folder.
On an explorer window go to the menu Tools -> Folder options Options. View tab. Hidden files and folders. And select “Show hidden files and folders” from the radio buttons. That should then make the hidden “Application Data” folder visible.
thanks
Those f** b*** REALLY, i just became friends with the grox and this f** game crushed. I hate this whole stupid EA thing, How are you able to play a game without a SAVEGAME??? Could´t they know earlier such a bug is reaaly annoying REALLY!! sry for spamming, but i have to write somewhere, otherwise i´ll go and kill someone. i like this game and played something about 20 hours now, and now EVERYthing is lost, stupid f** EA. okay but thanks for the solving method. i´ll try it out. Hope it will work. byebye^^
it wont let me open the Game0.old folder. A pop up comes up and says exactly this.
C:\Documents and settings\username\Application Data\SPORE\Games\Game0.old is not accessable.
The file is directory or corupted and unreadable.
I think the corrupt save data is in this folder but it wont even let me delete it! HELP!!!!!
NITRO!!!! to fix your spore cut your game0.old out and paste onto your desktop run spore again and itll remake your game old!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! idk what may7 happen in a bit but i fixed it so far!!!!!!!
Jort i did what you told me to.. But my spore still will not start…So guess what i did, i delete all the file in the Game0 folder… Guess what it work!!
BUT! when i try to create a new game, by click a world, I got a BSOD!!! FTW!!!~
Can somebody please help me? Everytime I click on a planet to start a new game spore freezes. CAN SOMEBODY HELP!!
Useful site, where did you come up with the knowledge in this article? Im glad I found it though, ill be checking back soon to see what other articles you have.