Xbox Save Files

Unless the wait time is more than 15 minutes, this did not work for me.

This had happened to a buddy of mine about a week ago, and it never seemed to recover for him.

Also, I'm pretty sure I don't have cloud saves enabled for this game... Note: I have not been able to figure out how to confirm this claim.

I have characters and items associated with achievements unlocked. (this was also the experience reported by said buddy)

I strongly suspect my save was not imported in, the game noticed via achievements that I should have some stuff unlocked, it unlocked them for me, then saved out.

Edit: I waited an additional 15 minutes, then decided that maybe the main menu was the wrong place to wait, and tried waiting ~20 minutes on the Press A screen before the main menu, but that also did not resolve my issue.

I can see the little circling arrows on the bottom right of the game every time, which I've always assumed was for loading the game itself, not my save data... But maybe that's the sync save indicator you're talking about?

So this problem was sitting here for an hour and after I post the question it appears my save data decided to reappear.

As long as you're connected to the internet while playing a game, your progress is saved in the clouds. Next time just wait a little bit and you should see a syncing saved data
prompt.

for example, theres just a file called Pipeline.cache in the starfield folder?

looking through several of the folders I don't see many files that would indicate saves, more config files and the such.
Could it be that with the game pass it saves files to a cloud, linked to my profile or something?

I know Steam saves to the cloud so i shouldnt need to port anything over, does the game pass do similar?