Retrieving lost vehicles

[IAmMoss]

Has anyone tried running a world/ server in repair mode to respawn or retrieve a vehicle (boat, elk, etc...) that has disappeared after a game crash? looking on the internet i've never seen it brought up and whether it would work or not. Haven't had the chance to test myself, but if anyone could confirm positively or negatively that would be great. 

 

I know there's always the option to use creative, but with boats full of loot it's a pain in the butt to remember everything.

[Helst_navngivet]

Im sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but im pretty sure its impossible to retrieve the boat and the loot inside EXCEPT if you are willing to get very wild and fancy, you might be able to fish out the loot in the game files VintagestoryData -> archives (dated to when its from, select the date BEFORE you lost it) -> should be there somewhere, but that requires a bunch of external programs (SQLite3, for example), and i can speak from experience that its a pain to download those. (I havent completed it yet)

if you manage to do all of those things, including deserializing the protobuf format/ painstakingly reading from the (decrypted) hex string (which requires DB browser for SQLite), then you can probably recover your loot by looking in the "EntityData" file/folder. Probably.

hope this helps.

[IAmMoss]

On 4/29/2026 at 8:31 AM, Helst_navngivet said:

Im sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but im pretty sure its impossible to retrieve the boat and the loot inside EXCEPT if you are willing to get very wild and fancy, you might be able to fish out the loot in the game files VintagestoryData -> archives (dated to when its from, select the date BEFORE you lost it) -> should be there somewhere, but that requires a bunch of external programs (SQLite3, for example), and i can speak from experience that its a pain to download those. (I havent completed it yet)

if you manage to do all of those things, including deserializing the protobuf format/ painstakingly reading from the (decrypted) hex string (which requires DB browser for SQLite), then you can probably recover your loot by looking in the "EntityData" file/folder. Probably.

hope this helps.

I just found out that the game logs every item picked up, dropped, placed in a container, etc in the server audit log. That's probably common knowledge, but it really does just seem like the only way to reliably remember and get items back. Suppose I'll just have to start keeping a note pad file of chest contents in my vehicles. Sadly, lag spikes that crash the game are a common occurrence for me when my world starts getting larger. The woes of playing on steam deck.