Board Thread:Administrator's Noticeboard/@comment-5289687-20131022072001/@comment-1466854-20131130035200

I've never seen this myself, but my suggestions are fairly straightforward regardless. Mind you, this applies only to the PC version. I won't even attempt to diagnose console or phone issues.

First up, characters are tied to the presence of the .plr file in your Players directory, and to my knowledge, -only- to that. Anything that can cause a file to disappear can cause a character to disappear as well. That includes file or disk corruption, insane virus scanner heuristics registering false positives, third party programs modifying the files in unsafe ways, etc.

Now, the most likely issue here comes down to third party programs. Any time you're going to use ones that edit, create, modify, or even -can- remove worlds or players, -always- back everything up first. That includes programs you've used before. Just because it didn't break the first time doesn't mean it won't break in the future. Now, some make backups by default. Check around your profile directory (generally in the My Games\Terraria folder in your documents). If you can't find the file anywhere in there, and you already suspect a third party program was at fault, chances are you're out of luck. You can attempt to use an undelete program (search for one, they're not too hard to find), but there isn't much hope of it working. Pick up better habits for the future. If it -is- there, just copy it to the proper directory (My Games\Terraria\Players) and you're good to go.

For third party programs, I personally only ever use tEdit and Terrafirma. The former is rather obsessive with backups and hasn't ever caused issues for me, the latter doesn't write or modify the files in any way, and as such -can't- cause issues with missing files. Both of them also only affect the worlds, not the players.

If for some reason the file is there but your character won't list anyway, that's beyond my immediate understanding and would likely mean the file became corrupted. An undelete program -may- be able to restore it, but as always, that's a low chance. If that does happen, let me know. As far as I know though, that shouldn't be an issue.