Backing Up and Recovering Blueprints

Verified in a live install of the game

A ship takes hours to build and occupies about a quarter of a megabyte. That ratio is the whole argument for backing them up: the insurance is free, and the thing it insures is expensive. Here is where the game actually keeps everything, and what to do when a build goes missing.

Deleted blueprints are not gone

Next to the blueprints folder sits a second one called BlueprintsBin. Deleted designs move there instead of being destroyed, and that is what the recover button in the blueprint menu reads from.

It fills up faster than you would expect. On the install we measured, the live folder held 37 ships at 9.4 MB — and the bin held 199 files at 13 MB. Years of abandoned experiments, all still recoverable.

Both folders live at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\ApproximatelyGames\ApproximatelyUp\. The full walkthrough is in the installation guide.

Back up the whole lot in one drag

Copy the Blueprints folder somewhere else — another drive, a cloud folder, a USB stick. That is the entire backup. Dozens of ships fit in under ten megabytes, so there is no reason to be selective and no reason to compress anything.

Worth doing before a game update, and worth doing after a long build session.

Version your builds instead of overwriting them

The cheapest habit in the game: when a design changes meaningfully, save it as a new blueprint rather than replacing the old one. Numbered names make the history readable at a glance:

• hauler-v1
• hauler-v2-morelift
• hauler-v3-fuel

When v3 turns out worse than v2 — and it will, at least once — v2 is still sitting there intact. A large ship costs a couple of hundred kilobytes, so keeping ten iterations costs less than a single photo.

Sort ships into folders — including downloaded ones

The blueprint list supports folders, and which folder a ship sits in is stored in its .bpmeta file, in the _folder field:

{"_name": "Moonshot (P)", "_folder": "", "_version": "1.0.100"}

An empty value means the root of the list. On the install we looked at, 16 ships sat in the root, 12 in a folder named Workshop and 9 in one named ShipGen.

That gives you a tidy trick for ships you download from here. Open the .bpmeta in Notepad before you launch the game and set the folder yourself:

{"_name": "Moonshot (P)", "_folder": "Downloaded", "_version": "1.0.100"}

Now every imported ship lands in one place instead of scattering through your own builds. Keep the quotes and the commas exactly as they are — it is a JSON file, and a missing quote will break it.

Old blueprints keep working

The _version field records the game version a ship was saved on, and old ones are not swept away. The install we measured held blueprints spanning 1.0.000 through 1.0.105, all sitting side by side in the same list.

So an older ship is worth trying rather than dismissing. Load it next to a garage first — the risk with an old blueprint is not the file format, it is that the design may lean on parts you have not unlocked yet.