I thought I’d quickly write this up for anyone who may have lost all their ESO addon settings with the last patch. Your settings are still in the files, but due to a (supposedly) unintended bug, another list of settings has been added in there and the game is now reading blank settings, prompting you to need to set everything up again.
After I logged in and saw my UI all screwed up I promptly threw my computer out the window, but after I cooled off a bit and retrieved it I did some research and found out how to get my settings back.
1. Go into the “live” folder in your ESO folder. It’s probably in Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live.
2. Back up the “Saved Variables” folder by copying it to your desktop.
3. Open the original “Saved Variables” folder and you’ll see a bunch of .lua files. These are your settings.
You are going to edit these files to get your settings back. You can do it in Notepad, but if you have a lot of files I recommend using a text editor that will allow you to do a mass find and replace in all open files. Notepad++ does this (and it’s free). There are others, but that’s the editor I use.
4. Open one (or all) of your .lua files and perform a “find” for the following exactly as it is written: [“”] =
5. Replace it with something like [“@NEW”] =
6. Now (using the name of your account instead of “accountname”) do a find for [“@accountname”] =
7. Replace with [“”] =
8. Save and exit all open .lua documents.
If you do a mass find and replace in all opened documents, you are basically getting your settings back in one step. Note that this isn’t an officially supported solution, so use at your own risk. But then again that’s why you back up your Saved Variables folder!
Thanks to the ESOUI forums for this fix.
