RFTools Dimension Recovery

Dimension Recovery

This is a guide that I hope you will never need. But due to bugs, harddisk problems or other circumstances it is always possible that dimensions get lost. In case that happens there may be several solutions available to you. In this guide I try to go over the different possibilities for dimension recovery.

Backup! Backup! Backup!

First a tip. Make backups! Always. I backup my game world EVERY day before I start playing and I keep the last 5 to 6 backups. If you have a recent backup then perhaps you don't even need to read the rest of this guide. Just restore your latest working backup and continue playing from there.

RFTools Version

For some of the recovery tools mentioned in this guide you will need at least version 2.55 of RFTools.

Some Information

Before we continue let us first explain how dimensions are stored in Minecraft and what RFTools adds to that. The actual dimension data (your blocks, buildings, machines, ...) are stored in your 'saves/' folder. Every dimension that is in the game gets its own folder there. That includes the nether and the end (DIM1 and DIM-1) as well as any other dimensions added by other mods. RFTools dimensions can also be found there. For example, 'saves//DIM6' contains the chunks and blocks for dimension 6.

As long as those directores exist and are not really corrupt in some way it should be possible to get your dimension back.

Now for RFTools this is not enough. The dimension folder only contains the actual world contents but it does not tell the game how that world was generated and what the special features of that world are. If you want to explore such a dimension and Minecraft has to generate new chunks then the game has to know how to generate those chunks. For RFTools that information can be found in 'saves//data/RFToolsDimensionManager.dat'. This is a very important file that contains information about every RFTools dimension in the game. There is also 'saves//data/RFToolsDimensionStorage.dat' which contains the actual RF for every dimension.

Now let us go through a few possible disaster scenarios.

Dimension Information Lost

The dimension data is still present (i.e. the DIM folders) but somehow 'RFToolsDimensionManager.dat' got lost or corrupted. That means that are your buildings and such will still be in the dimensions but there is no way to access them from in the game.

If you have RFTools 2.54 or older then you will also be able to see that the dimension information is missing because all realized dimension tabs will become 'unnamed'. In more recent versions of RFTools (at least 2.55) it will tell you in the tooltip that the dimension has become invalid.

In this case you have two options. If you have a relatively recent backup of your world then you can start by copying the 'RFToolsDimensionManager.dat' file from that backup to this world. With a bit of luck that should restore all your dimensions and you can stop reading this guide.

However, if you don't have a recent backup or there are still some dimensions that you created since the last backup that are still missing then there is an option to recover that dimension. This only works in RFTools 2.55 or greater. Basically what you have to do is to hold the invalid dimension tab in your hand and then type: /rftdim recover

If all goes well that should recover your dimension (the dimension tab will no longer say that it is invalid). However there are a few things to keep in mind. When RFTools is restoring a dimension like this it can only use the information from the dimlets that were used to create this dimension. All random features it has to randomize again. If the 'randomizeSeed' config option is enabled (which it is not by default) then all random features have a high chance of being different. But by default if you are doing this with exactly the same mods as before then this randomization has a high chance of yielding back the same world with the same features.

In any case, you might want to check that the world you get back is resembling the world you had before. If not there is a way to change features (see next section on that).

Note that if the 'randomizeSeed' option is enabled then the world seed for the dimension will most likely also be different which means that new generated chunks might probably mismatch with already existing chunks. For void worlds that doesn't matter very much but otherwise this can be somewhat ugly. The only real good solution for this is to manually go and fix the ugly mismatched chunk borders (preferably in creative mode).

Restoring or Changing features

In recent versions of RFTools (at least 2.55) it is also possible to edit a dimension fully. To do this go in game and type: /rftdim savedim (for example: /rftdim savedim 10 /tmp/dim10.json) This will output a json file describing the dimension. You can make edits in this file (but be VERY Careful here) and then go back in game and do: /rftdim loaddim If you did the right thing then you will now have edited your dimension.