Missing/alternate Profile.dat

I began playing Cave Story back in July of this year for the first time (I have a large backlog of good games I'd never played, and Cave Story was one of them). I run Windows 7 and the freeware translated version. I played through it, and it's been saving up the Last/Final Cave, and I wanted to edit my save file to give me a boost through the frustrating lava/spikes everywhere.

However, I can't find the Profile.dat file I need to edit. For some reason, the Profile.dat in the folder hasn't been updated since July, and viewing it with a save editor confirms that I only have the Polar Star and still in Mimiga Village. I assume that there is a save file being read and accessed from somewhere else. So here's the things I found out from fiddling with things for an hour:
- At one time, the CaveStory folder was moved from one place to another, however, its original home in the Downloads folder seems to yield nothing.
- Looking at the most recent Date Modified files in the hard drive yields nothing nor does looking for "Profile.dat".
- Removing the old Profile.dat from the CaveStory folder does not affect the current save file BUT copying manually ALL the visible files in the CaveStory folder and moving them to another folder causes the game to restart due to a lack of a save file, making me think that there is a "hidden file" I'm not seeing, but I've also turned on settings to see that sort of thing, so it's probably drawing from a source that's not indexed.

Has anyone else had this problem? Am I just screwed over? It would be a shame if I had to reconstruct my save file, seeing as how I saved Curly and Booster and completed at least 85-90% of the game.

 

well, there's plenty of saves on the tribute site anyway http://www.cavestory.org/download/saves.php
my best guess is that you're running cave story from Program Files or some other restricted folder and the save is getting rerouted to %APPDATA% or something. It's generally easier to run cave story from like "my documents" or some other folder you have full access to because it is older than these kinds of windows security features.

 

I'm having a bit of trouble understanding exactly what your computer is doing as far as reading from the save file, and whether it's some mistake you're making that you don't realize, or if your computer is truly doing something bizzare. I'm going to have to assume the former since in order for the latter to be true, you'd have to be infected with some freaky virus or someone's playing some prank on you. The game should always load up whatever file is named "Profile.dat" that is in the same folder as the EXE. If you're modifying a save file and it's not changing your game, then you're probably not modifying the right save file. I suppose Noxid's theory might be true as well. If you really can't fix things, then there's always the option of downloading a fresh version of the game and downloading a save file from the list that Noxid gave a link to.

 

well, there's plenty of saves on the tribute site anyway http://www.cavestory.org/download/saves.php
my best guess is that you're running cave story from Program Files or some other restricted folder and the save is getting rerouted to %APPDATA% or something. It's generally easier to run cave story from like "my documents" or some other folder you have full access to because it is older than these kinds of windows security features.

That makes the most sense. My "temp" folder with a Profile.dat that actually works is run off from the Desktop, while I had placed CaveStory (folder) inside Program Files (x86). It's somewhere out there, but I opted for a save file (thanks for the suggestion) and then modified everything to match what I had before (some things are out of order but okay). I also bumped my health up to 85 instead of 50 to help get through the last cave, which was one of the things I wanted to do.

 

Before final cave hidden heres a save file with booster before last cave if that helps

 

This might be late but, i think the location of your save file is at "C:\Users\(Username Here)\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\Cave Story Deluxe\CaveStory". It has the Profile.dat file inside.