Creatures Docking Station: How to Fix Cloud Saves

If your game is having issues launching, as you’ve done a fresh install and have missing 3rd party content, you’ll have to either find the missing content and install it or remove the affected worlds.

Creatures 3 & Docking station were made many years before Steam Cloud support, when they designed the game itself back in 1999-2001 the idea of cloud saves weren’t quite a thing. Steam Cloud doesn’t know what 3rd party content you added and installed, and the game doesn’t know how to handle missing things any better.

My Game is stuck on the loading screen and I have to kill it in the Ctrl Alt Del menu!

This is likely due to C12DS or another addon that edits the world switcher. When you reinstall the game, the cloud saves features downloads all your worlds and norns. when you load the game with the old worlds, it’s still looking for C12DS and can’t find it, so it causes the world switcher to get auto-killed and removed. Following the directions below, or installing C12DS again will fix the issue.

There is no easy way to fix this situation. The game is not designed with cloud saves in mind, and Steam limits the amount of space you can use on a cloud save, so backing up all third party content wouldn’t work either.

Quit out of DS/C3

Disable Steam Cloud saves via right clicking on the game ->Properties… ->De-check Keep games saves in the cloud for Creatures Docking Station

Delete all files in Steam\userdata\SteamID\1659050.

Delete the affected worlds in your My Worlds folder

Start the game to create fresh (and thus different) new files.

Exit the game and Steam.

Delete remotecache.vdf in Steam\userdata\SteamID\1659050.

Start Steam.

Enable Steam Cloud, start the game and the “Sync conflict” dialog should appear. Select upload the new files from the computer.

The problem should now be resolved.