Sorry to hear that happened to you buddy. I feel your pain. Looks like the world eating bug is rare but soul crushing if it happens.

All these people acting like smartasses, until it happens to them. This is a type of game that takes a lot of creative investment, exploring map, building and terraforming etc that can't be simply recovered with cheats like equipment of stats.

Looks like all we can do now is backup our saves. Hopefully fixing this issue is on the top list of priority for the devs right now.