6. The Gaia User Data Folder

When you begin working with Gaia, you will notice that it creates a "Gaia User Data" folder in your project.



This folder contains all "user data" or "movement data", that is data created by actions from the user that are not part of the Gaia installation itself. In other words: It creates the terrains you made, terrain texture layers, potentially biome settings that you made and so on.
The idea between this separation is that it is easier / safer to reinstall Gaia because you can just keep the user data folder, delete the installation folder and reinstall, and continue working with Gaia.

It is not a good idea to delete this folder without knowing what you are deleting exactly, as this might compromise your entire(!!!!) work done with Gaia in this project! You WILL lose all terrains made with Gaia if you just delete the user data folder.

If you are careful though, and ideally make a backup before deleting anything, it is possible to clean out the Gaia User Data folder from old / unwanted content.

To do so, you can follow these descriptions to see if there is anything in the user data folder you might want to delete to save storage space & keep your project lean. Note that you might not always have all these folders that are listed here, some are being created only "on demand" while using the application. The folders you can find in the Gaia User Data folder are:

Biomes

Default folder to store user-made biomes and spawner settings in. To determine if you can delete those, you would need to look at the biome and spawner settings files in there and decide if you still need those. Deleting those would in theory not destroy any existing scenes, as the data from these files is also stored in the scene itself, but it would be quite inconvenient if you later notice that you want to apply that biome or spawner to a different scene and those files are missing.

Screenshots

Stored Screenshots made with the screenshot tool / Photo Mode. Those can be safely deleted if you do not want to keep the images.

Sessions

This is the big one: This folder contains the "session" data. A session in Gaia refers to all steps that were performed to create your final terrain. The session folder therefore contains such things as:

• Flora Data (Settings data from the flora terrain detail rendering system)
• Session Operations (data containing the exact settings that were used to perform a certain action with Gaia)
• Terrain Data (the shape and texturing of the terrain)
• Terrain Layers (the texture setup for terrains)
• Terrain Scenes (contains the sub-scenes with smaller terrain tiles for terrain loading)

You can probably imagine that the effect of deleting the above when you actually want to keep the scene that was made with this session - the scene would be lost completely, and you would need to rely on backup data to bring it back. You would need to make sure you do not need the data of that session anymore. To make sure, you can check in the session manager which session data this scene is using. If you know of a scene that you do not want to keep, you can check in the session manager which session file it is using, and you would know which session folder you can safely delete:

Note that the session manager allows you to rename the session to easier keep track of the session names:



You can also guesstimate according to the date / time in the default session name when you created the session if you would still need it, if it is 2 years old and you do not know what that is anymore, you can probably delete it, but do so at your own risk!

Settings

Contains user specific settings such as which biomes / spawners should appear in the Gaia Manager, or build configurations from the Gaia Manager window. Not recommended to delete as you will not really gain much space, and those files will be recreated with default settings then.

Stamps

Stamp image files that were created by exporting from different sources, such as the Scanner Tool, or exported from the Stamper, World Designer. Note that the stamp images put in here will also show up in the Stamp Browser when selecting a stamp image in the stamper. You can look at the stamp images and decide if you want to keep them for using in the stamper (or potentially as mask for a spawner), if not, you can safely delete them.