If you’re Australian and you were also keen to play No Man’s Sky on PC, you’ll have noticed that the cheapest versions of the game weren’t through Steam. Good Old Games surprisingly had one of, if not the best, offerings prior to launch presuming you weren’t prepared to buy the game from less than reputable retailers.
But not buying on Steam has some problems. And while there’s a lot to like about GOG’s service, the one thing it doesn’t have is cloud saves. Fortunately, there’s a way to fix that.
We take the cloud for granted, us gamers. That’s not a platform exclusive thing, either. But when you try and fire up a game on another PC through GOG’s Steam-esque client, GOG Galaxy, you don’t get the benefit of the cloud.
And for No Man’s Sky, that’s a lot of lost progress. Fortunately, there’s an answer.
The save files for the game are conveniently saved deep within the Users folder for Windows. They’re in a sub-folder called “HelloGames”, which you can see below:
To get here, the full folder path is: “C:UsersXXXXAppDataRoaming”, where “XXXX” is the name of the account you logged into Windows with.
This should be the default path whether you’re using Windows 7, 8, 8.1 or 10, although if you’ve relocated your Users folder to another drive then you’ll have to navigate there. Alternatively, just type “appdata” into the Run dialog (which you can bring up by pressing R+Windows key) and press Enter, and you’ll have saved yourself the trouble.
All you have to do from that point is compress or copy the HelloGames folder. Drop it onto a USB stick or zip it up into an email — the whole folder is only a few megabytes large — and then your No Man’s Sky save is ready to go.
The only thing required from there is to paste the files into the same location on your second PC, or the PC you’ve just freshly installed No Man’s Sky and GOG Galaxy on, and you’re free to carry on your space adventures from where you last left it.
Of course, it’d be nice if GOG just enabled cloud saves so people didn’t have to mess around with all of this. That said, messing around with the game’s files seems to be a prerequisite for playing NMS on PC at this point anyway.
Comments
15 responses to “A Tip For Those Who Bought No Man’s Sky On Good Old Games”
I found out GOG didn’t have cloud saves after reinstalling Windows and losing all my Witcher 3 progress (had just finished the first DLC)!!!
You can just pop %appdata% into the Run console (Win key + R) and it will take you straight to that folder, really handy as AppData is a hidden folder by default.
That’s in the following paragraph 🙁
not quite, you forgot the “%” signs necessary to access it through the start menu
edit: nvm, use % to access through the start menu or just appdata through the run dialog
My apologies, I scanned through for %appdata%… I learned today that just appdata into Run actually works.
You do need to include the ‘%’ if you’re typing into the address bar in an Explorer window.
Makes me wonder if some dev at Microsoft spent so much time in their Appdata folder they built the (slightly) shorter alias into the Run dialog.
If you want something more approximate to cloud saves you can also symlink the save folder into Dropbox.
If you want to do this then you’re probably better off using “mklink /j” to create a symbolic link in your Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. folder that points to your save game location. That way the files will always be up-to-date without having to manually copy them.
Cloud saves on the cheap.
Edit: How-To Guide http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/
I’m wondering how much of a thing cloud saves are…are they really such a big deal? How many PC’s are you planning on playing the game on? Sure they are convenient but I don’t think they are by any means mandatory.
I guess an argument can be made for reinstalling Windows or formatting or something, but I just recently reinstalled Windows and I looked up where Witcher 3 save games were located and backed them up beforehand.
I’ve had jobs where I was allowed to install and play games during my lunch break (mostly jobs in the games industry). Cloud saves were brilliant for that.
Yeah, I dunno… I honestly turn them off half the time because for me personally they’re pretty pointless. I mean I did just fine without them for all those years…
Did not realise people felt this strongly about them.
it really comes in handy for some large games or games that take a long time like command & conquer or skyrim and such because doing fresh installs and such i don’t have a lot of space to keep game backup saves and as well games so i tend to delete games and there saves and just reinstall them
You can also restart your progress this way. All you have to do is delete the save folder.
As an Australian I can tell you that no, I do not take cloud saves for granted
onedrive the folder for your work PC!
Cloud saves?
Sorry, I don’t play Final Fantasy.
Cloud stuff is all fine and dandy, but what about those who bought the game on GOG and can’t even play it. Some need the experimental patch that’s out on the beta channel on Steam and not on gog (yet?). And because it is currently in testing, by the time GOG get it up and running the full patch will have already come out and yet more days go by that some GOG users still can’t even experience the game… 🙁
No update about that.