Valheim 1.0 "[Old Format]" and "Missing DB": Recover Your World

Valheim 1.0: world shows "[Old Format]" or "Missing DB"

Valheim 1.0 shipped on 9 September 2026. Within hours the same two reports started appearing: a long-running world tagged [Old Format] in the select screen, or the world refusing to load with Missing DB. Several people found their backups carried the same [Old Format] tag, which is the part that makes this feel unrecoverable.

In most cases nothing is lost. These are two separate problems with two separate fixes, and the worst outcome usually comes from acting on the wrong one. Work out which label you are looking at first.

Before you touch anything

Copy the whole save folder somewhere else, right now, before you try any fix on this page. Not a move, a copy. Every recovery below is safe, but the failure mode people report is a well-intentioned fix applied to the wrong problem, on the only copy they had. If your world lives on a hosted server, take a manual backup before you start rather than relying on the last scheduled one.

What each label actually means

"[Old Format]" means the save predates the cloud-save layout

This label is much older than 1.0. Valheim's Cloud Save patch of 20 June 2022 introduced a new save location, and files written before it are marked as legacy saves. They sit in the pre-2022 folder rather than the current local or cloud folder. The tag says "this file lives in the old place", not "this file is broken".

That is why it surprises people at 1.0: a world touched rarely since 2022, or restored from an old archive, can carry the tag without anything being wrong with it. A backup made from a legacy save is itself a legacy save, which is exactly why the backups show the same tag.

First, the thing that changed at 1.0: a world is now a folder

Before 1.0 a world was two files sitting side by side. Valheim 1.0 writes each world as its own directory, in a chunked format. Verified on live 1.0 servers on the day of release:

worlds_local/
  MyWorld/                          the world, now a directory
    _main.5.fwl2                    metadata: name, seed, owner
    _main.5.db2                     world data
    _main.5.chunks                  chunk index
    _main.5.ok                      written when a save completes
    1e_20__1_1.chunk  ...           terrain, one file per chunk
  MyWorld_backup_auto-20260909-155858/   backups are directories too
  MyWorld.db   MyWorld.fwl          your pre-1.0 files, left in place

Three consequences, and they are the source of most of the confusion today:

• Your old files are not deleted. The legacy .db and .fwl stay exactly where they were. Nothing is destroyed by updating.
• Conversion happens when the world is next saved, not when the server updates. We watched a world last saved in August get a fully populated directory the moment it was played on 1.0.
• An empty world folder is normal. If the directory exists but has nothing in it, that world simply has not been saved since the update. We found 60MB worlds sitting safely in their legacy files next to an empty new folder. Do not read an empty folder as a lost world.

If you host with someone who asks you to upload a world, you now upload the whole directory, not a pair of files. That is why a world you created today looks nothing like the ones you uploaded before.

What the uploader accepts

The archive may contain one world folder, a nested world folder, or the whole saves folder. These are the two cases worth checking before you upload.

• The world folder is empty or incomplete. Extra nesting is okay: Supercraft finds a complete world folder at any depth. The folder must contain one matching generation of _main.<n>.fwl2, _main.<n>.db2, _main.<n>.chunks and _main.<n>.ok. If the .ok marker or data files are missing, load the world once in 1.0, let it save, then upload again.
• You zipped the whole saves folder. Because 1.0 leaves the legacy files in place, that folder holds your current world as a directory and its pre-1.0 self as a .db and .fwl pair. Supercraft selects the complete 1.0 folder, ignores the stale pair with the same name, and skips backup directories. Uploading the world folder on its own is still the clearest option.

An empty or incomplete world folder will be refused, and that refusal is correct. It means the world has not completed a save under 1.0 yet, so the real world may still be in the legacy files beside it. Load the world once in 1.0, let it save, then upload.

"Missing DB" means half the world file pair is absent

This section is about the pre-1.0 format, which is still what you have until a world has been saved under 1.0. In that format a world is two files that must travel together:

• WorldName.db is the world itself, every building, terrain edit and dropped item.
• WorldName.fwl is the metadata, essentially the seed and name.

Missing DB means Valheim found the .fwl and could not find a usable .db beside it. The world appears in the list, because the list is built from .fwl files, and then refuses to load, because the actual world data is not there. The two files must also have matching names.

Fixing "[Old Format]"

Valheim converts legacy saves itself. You do not edit files.

1. On the character selection screen and again on the world selection screen, use the move to local or move to cloud button on the entry that carries the tag.
2. Quit the game fully. The conversion completes on exit, and this is the step people skip.
3. Start the game again. The entry should now appear without the tag.

Do this with every mod disabled. Conversion is reliable on vanilla and unreliable with a mod loader attached, which is the single most common complicating factor in the reports from launch day.

Fixing "Missing DB"

The right fix depends on whether the .db was never written or has been separated from its .fwl.

If the world is new, or was restarted soon after creation

On a dedicated server the .db is only written at the first autosave, which is roughly twenty minutes in. A server created and then restarted inside that window produces a .fwl with no .db at all, and there is nothing to recover because nothing was ever saved.

To avoid it on a fresh world: join, then type /save in the chat and wait a moment before you stop or restart anything. That forces the first write immediately.

If the world is established

The .db almost certainly exists somewhere, and you do not have to find it by hand. Our Valheim World Recovery tool reads a world folder, pairs every .db with its .fwl, ranks the copies by save time and integrity, flags orphans, and hands back the newest intact pair as a ready-to-upload world. It runs entirely in your browser and never modifies your originals.

It reads the 1.0 folders too. Point it at your worlds folder and it lists each 1.0 world, picks the highest save generation that finished writing (the one with its .ok file), and shows your pre-1.0 pair as what it is, a frozen rollback point from before the update rather than a newer save. The one thing it cannot see is a completely empty world folder, because there are no files for the browser to hand over. That is the not-yet-saved case described above, and it is normal.

If you would rather do it manually, look in this order:

1. Beside the .fwl. Check for WorldName.db.old, which is Valheim's own previous-save rotation, and for files whose names no longer match.
2. In the backup folder. Read timestamps carefully and take a .db and .fwl from the same timestamp. A mismatched pair is a new problem rather than a fix.
3. In the other save location. A world can be half-migrated between the local and cloud folders, leaving one file in each.

Copy the matched pair back into the worlds folder, keeping the original names, and load it.

If you were running mods

Our 1.0 mod compatibility tracker combines Thunderstore build dates with what players report after testing, including the mods that work fine despite having shipped no 1.0 build. Treat anything not listed there as unverified rather than broken. Iron Gate's own position is that with no official mod support they cannot guarantee any mod is functional at 1.0.

Before you remove an inventory or equipment mod, empty its slots. Gear left in mod-added equipment or quick slots can disappear when the game loads without that mod, and players lost armour that way on launch day. That is a separate loss from anything happening to your world file.

Launch day produced some genuinely alarming symptoms from stale mods, including a character duplicating itself repeatedly until the game had to be killed. If your world misbehaves after 1.0 and you had mods, remove the mod loader entirely rather than disabling plugins one by one, then load the world vanilla before concluding anything is wrong with the save.

Does an old world even work at 1.0?

Yes. Existing worlds keep working and receive new content, but Deep North terrain only generates in areas nobody has explored yet. If your crew has already ranged far north, that ground is fixed as it was and the new biome will not appear there. Iron Gate recommends a fresh world for the best experience, which is a recommendation about content rather than a warning that old saves break.

That trade-off, and how to run both worlds side by side rather than choosing, is covered in new world or continue at 1.0 and Deep North world compatibility.

What actually prevents this

Every recovery above depends on having a copy from before the update. The reports that end badly are the ones where the only backup was the world itself.

If mods are the suspect, the World and Modpack Doctor reads a modpack against a world and reports which plugins are implicated, which is faster than pulling them one at a time.

On a Supercraft Valheim server, daily backups run automatically and you can take a manual one before any update from the panel, so the pre-1.0 state stays available while you experiment with the current one. Restoring is a panel action rather than a file hunt. Uploads take a world in either format: a 1.0 world folder, or a pre-1.0 .db and .fwl pair, which stays intact as a pair. If you are recovering a world right now, restoring a backup and uploading a world cover the mechanics.

Related

• INCOMPATIBLE_VERSION after an update, when the world is fine but the client and server are on different builds.
• Creating backups and restoring a backup.
• Valheim 1.0, what shipped and what it changes for a server.