I have an endgame character with a lot of gear and I'd absolutely hate losing it, so I thought of making a backup by copying the .plr file.... except it's not there. There is only the .plr.bak file.
The thing is, I deleted the .plr back some time ago, and when I recovered it from the recycle bin it was way older than my current character. Like when I deleted it I had turtle armor.
Is there a way to directly make another .plr of my character?
The .plr.bak (backup) file is the same as the .plr but with the added .bak extension. Remove the .bak then load terraria and see if the character shows up then.
The .bak may not be as current as the .plr file was, but should be very close if not exactly the same. My files are currently 8 minutes apart for example.
Isn't your character on the cloud ?
If you click on the cloud icon next to the play, when you select your character, then the plr file gets uploaded into the steam cloud, and deleted from your Players folder, only the bak file remains.
If that's the problem, then all you need to do is click on the cloud icon again to download a plr file into you Players folder.
bak-filesand you have it left from non-cloud save. Serialization, transferring data and replacing should be absolutely safe. You can only loose it if it gets corrupted due to bug in the Terraria, but that's highly unlikely.Starboundwould be the name of game where you must do backup (I've lost universes and characters several times due to power break).