
Open and Edit Save Files - MrWosabi
Hi, I recently lost some progress in a game cause the save file got coruppted. Then i found a post on reddit which shows a way to fix that corruption. Apparently it&#x27;s kinda risky but i lost 18 hours of progress so i&#x27;d like to take the risk. So i went to my save file and tried to open it with editor. But instead of a code i got some sort of hieroglyphs. The first part of this looked like this:
&quot;BND4           @       00000001                              P   ÿÿÿÿ         À          P   ÿÿÿÿ       Ú          P   ÿÿÿÿ         ô          P   ÿÿÿÿ      00           P   ÿÿÿÿ      @@ (          P   ÿÿÿÿ      PP B          P   ÿÿÿÿ      `` \          P   ÿÿÿÿ      pp v          P   ÿÿÿÿ      €€           P   ÿÿÿÿ       ª          P   ÿÿÿÿ         Ä          P   ÿÿÿÿ       °¦ Þ          U S E R _ D A T A 0 0 0   U S E R _ D A T A 0 0 1   U S E R _ D A T A 0 0 2   U S E R _ D A T A 0 0 3   U S E R _ D A T A 0 0 4   U S E R _ D A T A 0 0 5   U S E R _ D A T A 0 0 6   U S E R _ D A T A 0 0 7   U S E R _ D A T A 0 0 8   U S E R _ D A T A 0 0 9   U S E R _ D A T A 0 1 0   U S E R _ D A T A 0 1 1 &quot;
It was all written in one line. Well you can clearly see  that this is supposed to be some kind of code because the number of the lines are there (001, 002,...) and it even shows some words like User_Data. But the rest is pretty much just random signs. 
This has nothing to do with the corruption because i started a new game and the file looks the same. I also opened it with notepad++ but i got the same result. Do i need a different program to open this or is there something else wrong?
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Millennium
Notepad++ and your other editor show strange text because they always assume
that the file you're trying to open is a text file. This isn't the case (some
parts of the file actually are meant to be interpreted as text, but not the
whole file) but the editor does it's best to interpret the file as though it
were text. Those strange glyphs are parts of the file that aren't supposed to
be text.

It would be easier to answer your question if we knew what game you were
playing. Not many games share the same save file format, so there isn't a
single answer which will work well for everything. Some games' save file
formats do have dedicated editors made for them, and if one exists for your
game, that would be the easiest and safest way to edit your file.

Even if there isn't a dedicated editor, you should be able to edit the file
with a thing called a hex editor. You seem to be using Windows, so Free Hex
Editor ([https://frhed.sourceforge.net](https://frhed.sourceforge.net)) may be
a good place to start. This will still show you the strange characters on one
side of the screen, but it will also allow you to see and edit the actual
numbers, if you know where to look for them (and how to work in hexadecimal
numbers).

Can you link us to the Reddit post you were talking about? That would be
useful information for answering your question further.

