The Iceborne expansion for Monster Hunter World dropped just a few days ago on PC, but the update hasn't been making many gamers happy. Players have been complaining on Steam and Reddit that the latest expansion is seemingly deleting their saves, costing them hundreds of hours of progress.
Players have mentioned that after installing the Iceborne expansion, Monster Hunter: World tells players that the saves are not compatible and prompts them to create a new save game. Creating a new save game starts a whole new game, which begins a brand new story. What makes matters worse is that exiting the game after creating the save uploads the save to Steam if you have Steam Cloud Save enabled, overwriting the existing save game.
There have been several theories regarding why this could be happening and one of them states that the presence of mods in the game could be causing the issue. However, a few players have stated that having mods installed did not corrupt the game after installing the expansion. Another theory suggests that some players might have missed an update that changed the savegame format and now the Iceborne expansion is unable to read the saves. After the reports, Capcom has said that it is aware of the issue and is working toward resolving it.
If you haven't booted up your game, it is advisable that you manually backup your save game. To do so, you can navigate to the Steam folder - SteamUser data(your steam user ID number)582010. Also, if your saves have been deleted, you can use the MHWSaveTransfer utility to restore your save game and the "Iceborne Ready" saves, both of which can be downloaded from Nexus Mods.
Now, if you don't have to get your hands into this DIY stuff, you can divert your attention to some other game waiting in your library and wait until Capcom comes up with a fix. When the issue has been resolved and Capcom officially announces it, we'll be sure to let you know.
