So, system are saved on system drive and not game foler...

I formatted C:\ and now all my custom systems are gone


Dozens of hours of work... all gone...

The next system generator patch would've killed them anyway.

That's some good news.

But why game folder is not good for saving game related stuff? I never understood this.
I didn't delete game folder, all my bindings are fine. Why couldn't systems be saved in same location?

Spoiler

Some later C&C would litter every single corner of your system drive, say you install it under d:\games. but you'd find bits of it in my documents, appdata\local, appdata\roaming, appdata\locallow, program files, programdata and god knows where else, those were just my findings.

They are trying to separate the user data from the program data. I agree it's kinda horrible how every program uses their own folder for that and most of them are hidden.
For PA everything is in:
"%LOCALAPPDATA%\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\

It's so that- when a player deletes a game, they get to keep the saves and such in case they reinstall it.

Simple reason: Programms on a NT (NT, 2k, XP and every 6.x system) styles system cannot asume Write rights to the programm folder.

There is one place and one place only where we programmers can asume write rights: The user profile folder.
Bindings are stored with the playfab. They are stored on the server, not your computer!

Well, I'll know better next time. I'm too used to stuff being saved in clouds, I guess.

Saddest thing is that whole system reinstall didn't solve my problem

Yeah that sucks.. Windows trying too hard, just let me manage my own data. That way I can just blame myself when I lose everything.

Which is particularly annoying for those with partitioned disks and/or multiple hard drives.
Wish I knew a good setup for NOT having everything always saved to one drive...

symlinks

There is.
User folders could be moved as far back as Windows XP. Back then I made it a habbit to store My Documents on another harddrive using the built-in ways to do so. As long as windows knows where the folder is, every programm running on windows can figure out the right path.

With Vista the process got a bit more finely granulated/slightly more tiresome to set up.
While it is possible to jsut completely move the Users folder using hardlinks, this is not recommended anymore:
http://docs-windows.readthedocs.org/en/latest/move-users-to-another-drive.html
Instead you can jsut move specific librarires to another drive:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2079571/move-your-libraries-to-a-second-drive-or-partition.html
It cannot be applied to 100%, but it applies to all those that matter/you want to save during a reinstallation.

Best way, if you're using Windows 7, is to install, run the audit mode setup, and run a couple commands to tell Windows to install your user folder on another drive.

See this PDF for details

This makes everything in windows actually know where the users folder is, rather than using symbolic links or junctions.

The only caveat is that some programmers / programs assume that c:\Users is always there, so you may get the occasional program being stupid - you can get around that by making a symlink after installing windows, but it's not always required.

Hmm... is there a way to retrieve systems from replays? I am trying to rebuild my collection, but I can't get to the level of awesome I had before.

So, I've bought a new pc, copied %appdata%\local\uber\planetary annihilation to my new pc, PAMM sees all the mods I had, but I don't have any of my planets.

Can anyone please tell me where custom planets are saved?

I did a reg edit so all that stuff is on my other drive.
All I have on my SSD is Windows and Kaspersky. Everything else is on my 2TB HDD.

If only there was a blue box that you could go into, go back in time and stop yourself from formatting

you don't ever format C until you've gone through it all.

FAFreplays, minecraft saves, tons of other files are in places other than the user folder.

you were too hasty, lesson learnt I guess.