SCII Settings/Hotkeys Not Saving

Technical Support
1

I have been struggling with this for the last two days and wanted to put this post up in case it helps anyone else.

The Problem: I’ve play SC2 on again off again for the last 10 or so years and have never had a problem with saving settings/hotkeys and the like, but recently I could not after installs, reinstalls, changing install locations, etc get the settings to save! Every time I opened up SC2, it felt like the game felt that it was the very first time it had been opened

My setup: Standard install process, but I installed SC2 to a drive other than the C drive. As a note, my D:\ drive failed about a month ago.

Symptoms: When booting up StarCraft II, the game always played the LotV Intro cutscene. Afterward when going to the Options screen, it always displayed the alert dialog and reverted all settings back to the defaults. When looking for the user settings under C:\Users<PCusername>\Documents\ StarCraft II… , no such directory existed. What I did find was that in the installation folder [Drive]:\path\to\installation\ there was a StarCraft II\Accounts<AccountNumber>\ folder with Variables.txt and Hotkeys. It appeared as though everything was being written to correctly (no readonly, no anti-virus, etc) but the game was not reading from this directory.

The issue: It turned out that one of my drives was corrupted… The drive that was previously being used to house my Documents folder! It seems like SC2 was looking for the Documents folder, found an invalid location and fellback to another directory. It just wasn’t reading from that fallback directory.

The fix:

  1. Open up File Explorer
  2. Expand “This PC” on the left nav
  3. Right click the Documents folder. Select Properties.
  4. Click the Location tab at the top
  5. Click Move and select a new location for your Documents
  6. In my case, I had an error message because it couldn’t find the previous directory (because it was corrupted). Choose Ignore then No at the next dialog.

And you’re good to go! After opening up SC2 again, you’ll find the settings in the usual path in the newly selected Documents folder.