How do I restore a saved game in Don't Starve?

I hate to ask a stupid question, but, I just started playing Don't Starve this evening. I know the game saves every time a day passes, but when I die I have not seen any option for restoring that saved progress.

Why does the game save progress if you can't restore it? Is that just so you can quit the game and pick up close to where you left off?

Solution 1:

Don't Starve uses the permadeath system commonly seen in traditional rogue-likes such as nethack - when your character dies, the save is deleted automatically. Of course, there are ways to escape death...

Through the use of Life Giving Amulets, Touch Stones or Meat Effigies

... but otherwise death is permanent. The game saves every game day to make sure you don't lose your progress if the game crashes, and also to ensure you can't cheat by reverting to a previous save.

Solution 2:

To explain further what Ice is saying, here is how to rollback to a given backup file:

First, you need to locate your saved files. Mines are in Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\31706488\219740\remote... but if you go in your steam folder, you can search for survival_1 file.

Survival_1 is your game in the first game slot, Survival_2 second slot and so on..
saveindex is where the game validates the Survival files when you try to load your game.

So, what needs to be done is to backup both saveindex and survival files. You can do it everyday.. once in a while.. whenever you want to be able to rollback to this point.

Whenever you die, you need to restore both files again. Be careful to backup all your files if you play multiple games at the same time.

Hope this helps!