Your Elden Ring saves should now be safe from Steam Cloud issues

In the past week, quite a few Elden Ring players have suffered problems with save files on Steam. They weren’t being synced properly online with the Steam Cloud, which led to Steam asking whether they wanted to use the cloud save or local save. This question spooked some, leading them to choose poorly and end up with an old save, missing maybe hours of progress. Oh no. That ssshould be fixed now, by a Steam patch Valve released on Friday. But do be cautious if you’re asked.

“Under certain conditions, save data may not sync properly with the Steam Cloud in the PC version of Elden Ring,” the game’s Twitter warned on Friday night. It pointed to a support page which explained that when prompted to resolve the conflict, you have to carefully check the timestamps lest you lose your newest save. The page even advised manually backing up your local saves.

Elden boy Ed says he saw this problem last week and was prompted to pick his saves. Thankfully, he chose wisely. But I’ve seen quite a few people lamenting losing hours of progress.

The game’s Twitter followed up on Sunday with apparent news of a fix:

An update for the #Steam client has been released which should prevent the issue of conflicting local and cloud save data. Please update your Steam client to the latest version.

— ELDEN RING (@ELDENRING) March 5, 2022

I assume that’s this Steam update, which does have quite a few changes with Steam Cloud bits. Steam should automatically check for an update and go to install it. If not, go to the ‘Steam’ dropdown menu in Steam and hit that “Check for Steam Client Updates…” option.

Still, if you did lose hours of a save, you might try to salvage that time by making a big show of going back and beating those bosses and baddies ‘blind, on your first try’. That’ll surely impress spectators.

The PC version of Elden Ring has also suffered problems with performance, crashes, and assorted frustrations. They’ve said they’re working on fixes. A shame this marred the launch, because the game’s a good’un. Ed’s Elden Ring review called it “an unmissable journey through the most impressive open world to date”.