[PC] Character is gone but map and world is still there. How to fix?

[fixthisgameandforum]

I've already put 150 hours into LI so I'm not about to redo it, plus a 1000 before.  My saveworld file is good because I learned a valuable lesson from ARK, to have multiple copies due to the sheer instability and unpredictability of this game.  But my character is now gone and all SP settings have been reset?  How?  How do the settings just reset themselves.  I'm being forced into a new character screen.  Doing so and loading it, I can see tames and what's little of my base since the game decided to unload all my mods.  But this is inherently pointless since none of that stuff belongs to any other character.

Maybe I'm the moron for thinking that the SAVEWORLD COMMAND ACTUALLY SAVED EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD, INCLUDING MY CHARACTER AND SETTINGS?  That's obviously not the case, so they should change the name of the command to savemapandnothingelse and another to savecharacterandsettings.

Any idea how to recover my character or do I just uninstall and chalk this up to 1 of a million unresolved failures by the devs.