PSA: Your Elden Ring save might desync from Steam cloud, so look carefully

Elden Ring turtle on a beach — (Image credit: Tyler C. / FromSoftware)

Bandai Namco has announced an issue that can cause Elden Ring to, "under certain conditions," fail to save to Steam cloud. The problem will crop up when you're booting up the game, and you'll get an error message saying that your local files conflict with the steam cloud files, where a backup of your saves is kept. One of the two files will have a more recent date and time—that's the one you want to keep, like as not.

I can tell you this one's dangerous because it almost happened to me. If I hadn't paid attention to the pop-up, well, I'd have flushed some 20 hours of gameplay down the drain by downloading a days-old Steam Cloud save. Not so fun! I think it happened because of a game crash, which would be those "certain conditions" FromSoftware is probably frantically investigating as I write this.

Bandai Namco recommends you back up your save locally, for the time being, out of an abundance of caution. You might use Steam's backup feature for that, or navigate to your Elden Ring saves at the default location of C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\EldenRing.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.