Played the game on your PC, then went over to your other device and things didn’t look right? Here is how to fix that.
Guide to Fix
All credit goes to Underdog!
The Problem
So, you bought Sonic Frontiers, played a little on your PC and very likely set up some mods, and then decided to progress a little bit on your Steam Deck, or even any other secondary device you may have… but, when you get there, your saves are really behind where you are on the PC, or maybe even non-existent.
You’ve already made sure that the Steam Cloud is enabled globally on both of your devices, as well as for Sonic Frontiers. This leads up to…
The Solution
The issue is in the mod loader. The default settings have a little thing called “Enable Save File Redirection” enabled, which allows certain mods (like Boss Select) to over-ride your save files in a more convenient place. This is not where the Steam Cloud goes to sync your data between devices, so we are going to have to disable Save File Redirection in the mod loader for normal play. But it’s more work than that, because if you simply disable it, now your PC will have your old save files…
So, go into your SonicFrontiers folder, by going to Steam > Library > right click Sonic Frontiers > Properties > Browse Local Files, and open the savedata folder. You should have at least a folder called “auto0”, but depending if you did manual saves, you will also have “manual0”. For now, just leave this location open in the File Explorer.
Then, open a new File Explorer window, and travel to where the Steam Cloud usually stores your savedata, which is located in:
- C:/Users//AppData/Roaming/SEGA/SonicFrontiers/Steam
If you don’t see AppData, press View on top, and check Hidden Items.
In there, click the folder with the bunch of numbers that is your Steam User ID. You will then see the familiar auto and manual folders that you found in SonicFrontiers above. Put your save files in the appropriate folders, make sure Enable Save File Redirection is unchecked on the mod loader, and then save and load the game. Your save files should still be your current save files on your PC. Start your Steam Deck or secondary device, load up the game, and it should be updated there as well.
At the current time, I believe the only mod that even uses this function is the Boss Select mod. So, if you decide to use this mod, just remember to re-check the box, and then un-check it again when you are done.
As a general PSA, you will likely need to do this for any other Sonic game that uses the HedgeModManager, like Sonic Origins, etc. But for now, it’s Frontiering time!
THANK!!!! YOU!!!!!!!!!!!
This guide may no longer be needed.
A recent update to the HedgeModManager fixed the issue with save file redirection impacting cloud sync.
The fix might still only be in the nightly build, but it should be coming to the main release branch soon if it isn’t there already.
Having installed HMM on my Linux desktop recently, I had no issues with cloud sync between my desktop and Steam Deck.
So for anyone coming to this guide, check if you have pending updates for HedgeModManager.
Not sure about this comment…
>The “main release” has zero support for Sonic Frontiers at this time, so you have to use the development builds.
>My HMM is up to date, and I haven’t seen them add any notes about fixing this issue, either through the several updates HMM has received over the last couple of weeks, or by scanning their GitHub “commits” section. The only thing I could find so far about it, is fixing “redirection not working when mods are enabled”, which is a completely different issue. If there is some specific statement from them saying the cloud sync issue is fixed, I’d like to see a link to that.
>Linux and Windows obviously keep their cloud save files in different places, so that is likely the discrepancy here.
Thanks for looking closer into it.
Hopefully folks using HMM won’t have any issues soon.
Until then, anyone who runs into this issue will have this guide to help out.