Persistent File Not Found Error On Loading Custom Ships

[RedeyeFlight]

Greetings! I've been merrily building ships in RTW3 for hundreds of hours, but I ran into a problem when I recently decided to return to the game again. Attempting to load any Custom ship designs using the "Load Ship Design" option on the third screen of the builder produced a "File Not Found" error screen and then no further response. While I haven't used the feature, I noticed that the "Select picture" button for the ship profile picture also produced the same kind of error. No other feature produced this error, including all the "modify AI template" stuff which I avoid futzing with. As at this point I didn't have Expanded Battles, attempting to load Stock ships also produced this error.

After some fruitless troubleshooting, I bought Expanded Battles in the hopes that there was some kind of unforeseen compatibility problem, though that would have disappointed me since then I would have "had" to buy the DLC to get a feature I was using without it. Instead the problem became more complex rather than better. With Expanded Battles I can load Stock ships just fine, of course. I can also save Custom designs just fine -- the game has no trouble finding the Custom Files folder under Documents/Mygames as the post instructed me to put things into. However, it still can't load from Custom Files! This produces the same File Not Found error as before. As a test, I transferred some of my custom SDFs to the Stock designs folder, and the game WAS able to load those just fine, though it has finally obsoleted my older designs that are in the 10D/50D/etc. format (which is entirely understandable).

My only conclusion is that the Load Custom Ship button/command specifically is bugged, unable to find the correct folder. However, I don't know how to fix this on my end (if I even can), as setting that path isn't a customizable feature as far as I'm aware. I COULD just transfer my Custom designs into the Stock Design folder in the Steam/Common directory as a workaround, but that seems like a bad habit to get into and one prone to losing a bunch of data to overwrites from downloads, so I'd rather avoid it.

[decaf]

Dear RedeyeFlight,

I completely concur. Load Custom Ship button in the DLC/Ship Designer
is non-functional. The freaking Ship Designer saves custom designs to
one location -- but the Load Custom Ship button is trying to load
from God knows where. It's not just us -- this has been an ongoing,
outstanding bug in the path/folder naming for over 3 months:

Mar 26, 2026
designed custom ships, now file cant be located
https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopic.php?t=416351

Mar 22, 2026 - May 18, 2026
Can't load custom designs?
https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopic.php?t=416281

This second thread is particularly poignant, since MaximKI said an
upcoming update "hopefully resolves this issue very soon". And,
2 months later, said "we'll investigate further". And, sadly, the
latest update still does not address this issue.

You load you need to use the "Stock" button, then use the buttons
on the file explorer window, and work your way over to your
Documents folder tree to find your Custom saved designs. It's a PITA.
(But better than mixing your custom stuff with the game Stock designs)

I sincerely hope someone in NWS/Matrix fixes this....