8 Tips on How to Recover Minecraft Worlds (Computer, PS4, Xbox One Covered)

Since its full release in November 2011, Minecraft has been cited by some as one of the greatest video games ever created. Avid players are willing to spend hours of time to build a blocky, procedurally generated and 3D world with virtually infinite terrain.

It’s not difficult to imagine that how disappointing it could be to lost a Minecraft World. Whatever the reason, all your advancements or trophies achieved in Minecraft will disappear unexpectedly. Take it easy, this blog will deliver the biggest opportunity to recover deleted/corrupted Minecraft worlds on computer or on 2 common gaming consoles: PS4 and Xbox One.

 Cisdem Data Recovery for Windows and Mac

Your Second-to-none Choice to Recover Deleted or Corrupted Minecraft Worlds

• Recover game files safely without overwriting previous progress
• Retrieve data from PC/Mac hard disks, USB drives, SD cards, digital cameras, etc.
• Support the recovery of 1000+ file types
• Support NAS recovery
• Restore lost game files from PS4/5, Steam, Xbox One, etc.
• Repair corrupted photos, videos and even documents
• Preview found Minecraft world files before recovery
• Fast scanning speed and high recovery rate

Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 Free Download macOS 10.9 or later

Part 1: How to Recover Minecraft Worlds on Computer?

PC/Mac gamers don’t mean to delete a world in Minecraft? Or specific Minecraft worlds get missing out of game uninstallation or reinstallation, system crash, file corruption, virus infection, human error, etc.? Here are 6 solutions helping you out.

2 Quick Ways to Find Lost Minecraft Worlds

There’s one possibility that the disappeared Minecraft world files are just invisible, rather than removed from your computer. Therefore, before spending efforts on recovering any deleted worlds in Minecraft, first make sure the game files are not hidden somewhere. You can achieve this through the following 2 methods.

1# Search with .mcworld Extension

1. Open the File Explorer on Windows.
2. Input .mcworld file extension into the search box.
3. Check if your lost Minecraft worlds show up in the search results.
4. If you’re playing Minecraft macOS version, turn to use Mac Spotlight search.

2# Show Hidden Files

1. Open File Explorer, click View menu > Options.
2. Select View tab > hit on the radio button before “Show hidden files, folders, and drives”.
3. Choose Apply > OK.
4. Now go to check if you can access the missing Minecraft worlds again on Windows.

When neither of the above tips manages to reshow your lost Minecraft world files, it’s likely that they have been purged off your computer. Proceed to learn how to recover deleted Minecraft worlds with or without backups.

Restore Deleted Minecraft Worlds Without Backup

In case no backup of deleted Minecraft worlds is available, the most suitable recovery method must be utilizing a piece of 3rd-party data recovery software. Since a Minecraft world will be temporarily stored in the local hard drive when we create it on PC/Mac, the world file has a big chance to be recovered by a data retrieval tool. Which one is worth a shot? You Minecraft players are suggested to choose Cisdem Data Recovery.

Cisdem can be such a powerful Minecraft world recovery program to restore deleted, lost or formatted world files from Minecraft easily. Even better, it’s also capable of handling game data deletion/loss on various game platforms such as PS4/5, Steam, Xbox One and others.

How to restore Minecraft worlds without backup?

1. Download, install and run Cisdem on your computer.
   Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 Free Download macOS 10.9 or later
2. Choose PC Recovery, select the storage location where you delete Minecraft worlds and click “Search for Lost Data”.
3. The program will start to scan your selected drive via Quick scan and Advanced scan. After it finishes, go to Type > Others folder to locate your desired Minecraft world files. Alternatively, search .mcworld file extension directly.
4. Select the world files you want, click Recover and choose a proper destination folder to save them.

Recover Deleted Minecraft Worlds from Backup

Providing you have initialed the Windows backup feature --- File History to make any backups of your Minecraft folder before deletion happens, this method is luckily for you. The recovery process is achieved by restoring a previous version of the Minecraft world, where you’ll still lose part of the progress, but it’s much better than losing a whole world.

This time we’ll offer a guide for Minecraft Java Edition players, while the workflow for Bedrock Edition is pretty much the same. You only have to change the storage path in Step 1, which has been clarified at the end of last section.

1. Navigate to \Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\saves.
2. Right-click on the empty area of saves folder > select Properties.
3. Click Previous Versions tab > choose the exact folder containing your deleted MInecraft worlds > tap on Restore to complete.
4. Relaunch Minecraft on your PC to reaccess your world.

How to Recover Corrupted Minecraft Worlds?

Another scenario leading to a disappeared Minecraft world would be the broken world file. That’s to say, your Minecraft worlds may not be actually gone but they are somehow corrupted. So let’s try to fix the corruption issue and recover lost Minecraft worlds.

Case 1. In Minecraft Java Edition

1. Open File Explorer, locate the missing world file by going through \Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\saves, which has been mentioned in the previous method.
2. To avoid messing something up, you’d better make a backup copy of the Minecraft folder. To do this, create a new folder called Backup, copy & paste the Minecraft World folder into the new Backup one.
3. Turn to the original Minecraft folder > find and delete a file named level.dat.
4. Rename the file called level.dat_old to level.dat like the one we just deleted. level.dat_old is basically a backup of level.dat.
5. In the pop-up window, click Yes to confirm the renaming.
6. Jump back to Minecraft to see if the missing world is present.

Case 2. In Minecraft Bedrock Edition

1. Relaunch Minecraft > create a new world with the same settings as your lost one > save it and exit Minecraft.
2. In File Explorer on your Windows PC, navigate to: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.MinecraftUWP_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\games\com.mojang\minecraftWorlds.
3. Open the new world you created > find db folder > delete everything inside this folder except itself.
4. Go to your lost world folder > open its db folder > copy everything in it.
5. Paste the contents into the new db folder.
6. Open Minecraft again > open the world newly created to resume play.

Part 2: How to Recover Minecraft Worlds on PS4 Console?

Speaking of how to recover deleted Minecraft worlds on PS4, we have a pretty effective option for PS Plus users. PS Plus console is equipped with an auto-save feature to store game data in online Cloud storage. As below are the steps to recover deleted Minecraft worlds from PS4 Cloud saves.

1. Go to Settings on your PS4 home screen > scroll down to enter “Application Saved Data Management”.
2. Click on “Saved Data in Online Storage”.
3. Choose “Download to System Storage”.
4. Select the deleted Minecraft world you need to restore > hit Download.
5. Click Yes to start the downloading process. After that your Minecraft world will be back to PS4 system storage.

Part 3: How to Recover Minecraft Worlds on Xbox One?

According to some bloggers, there’s no way to recover it when we’ve deleted a Minecraft world on Xbox One. In fact, this is not entirely true. We’re still having a beacon of hope as the removed world from Minecraft might be available in the Xbox Cloud. Check out the instruction below to have a try.

1. On Xbox One console, open Minecraft game > press Play menu.
2. Go down to the bottom of the page, press “Sync Old Worlds”.
3. You’ll see a list of worlds stored in Xbox Cloud. Look for your deleted one and choose it.
4. Select Download option to download the world back to Xbox One.

If your deleted world doesn’t show up in the Sync Old Worlds list, it could have been permanently deleted from the Cloud as well. In that situation, we may not be able to restore it.

Closing Words

Worlds deletion, loss or corruption means losing game progress, which is absolutely not a pleasant thing for Minecraft players. This blog comes to the rescue by providing an ultimate tutorial on how to recover Minecraft worlds on computer, PS4 and Xbox One. More importantly, it’s always a good idea to make regular backups of your game data to prevent permanent loss of your Minecraft trophies.