It might be that a mob destroyed your ship while you were elsewhere, it happened to me once, or the portal might have gotten destroyed on one end. Also for the saves, what they are saying is true. What I do is save to cloud, exit the game, launch game then save to local file, exit game, then relaunch game and save it back to cloud, so at least you will always have a up-to-date local save that is the same as the cloud.

You can find the local saves as follows: C drive-user admin-AppDaa-LocalLow-Iron Gate-Valheim. Then you will find 2 folders, one called "characters_local" and "Worlds_local."

I zipp the files of both to secure them.

For the character, you are looking for your character's name followed by a ".fch". DO NOT DO .fch.old. That is a outdated file for your character. Note also that as soon as you save back to cloud, the local save will say ".fch.old", but as long as you havnt dont anything, cloud and local save will be the same. As for your world, you will find it in the same place but in Worlds_local. It will have two files you will have to zip. One is called (your worlds name) followed by the ".db" and ".fwl" Again do not save ones that have this: .db.old or ".fwl.old". Those are old files, however, know that again, much like your character file, as soon as you save back to cloud, the .db and .fwl files will both have the .old, but as long as you have not destroyed, moved, or build anything in-between the local and cloud saves, both are identical.

How to zip: select file, if two files, hold down left ctrl, then right click on them click on "sent to" should open up a option to "sent to compressed (zipped) folder. All this does is make a copy of the selected file(s) and puts them into a protected folder than the computer or game ignores unless you manually open it yourself.

hope that helps, or anyone else having "save" issues for their world or character.