I accidentally deleted a kernel file from the /boot partition of my encrypted Ubuntu system. Full disk encryption, no separate /home partition. Re-installing the kernel has turned out to be a dead end (none of the threads I found on google have worked for me). So no I'm just trying to access the /home folder to recover a few files. I'm using Ubuntu live USB 16.04.

I am able to unlock the partition with the But when I run it does not show the ubuntu--vg-root volume group, it only shows "recover" which I think is just the container. All the guides I read say to mount /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root, but this volume group never shows up when I unlock the partition. Any way around this?

Did you try running vgscan after unlocking the partition?

With the partition unlocked, you need to run "lvs" (as root) to scan for the logical volumes, and then "vgchange -ay ubuntu-vg" to activate the LVs in that volume group. Note that there is just a single "-" in "ubuntu-vg". The "--" you see in /dev/mapper is just the way a literal "-" in the VG name is represented there since a single "-" is the separator between the VG name and the LV name.

[EDIT] Yes, "vgscan" (and several other commands that cause a scan) will also work in place of "lvs". You'll still need the "vgchange -ay ...".