PC Crushed

[jzkool]

I woke up today to continue my base. I have been working my butt off building and scavenging. Today is the day I am crushed.

I continued my save. Unpacked my excess items from my inventory and started to leave my 9 day build of a base. Then the game froze completely.

When I rebooted my pc, the world was there, the area around my base had been greyed out (around 200 block x 200 block square reset). I spawned as a new character (grr).

I lost all my items, skills and books. Found my original base (walls and spikes still up) however my workbench, forge and cement mixer were gone, not to mention all the loot in my storages.

This is beyond frustrating. I'm beginning to feel the old MD5 has returned. I AM PI**ED OFF.

 

[theFlu]

Yeah, that sucks.. keep backups! We "shouldn't have to", but it's just so much better when we do ..

Simply copy-paste the save folder on the spot, the game will show you a new game with a "Name(copy)", but that's how you know you have one. Just delete and recopy on occasion. Won't cover for absolutely everything, but should work against random power fluctuations and other crashes.

 

[Riamus]

Tip for future:  If the game crashes, do NOT load your save until you've copied your save for the game to another location.  That way, if your save was broken, you can use the backup that the game makes to fix it.  That, or just copy the backup over your actual save without copying the folder itself.  The benefit of not using the backup unless your save was messed up is that you lose some time based on the last time that backup was updated, so better to not use it unless you need to.  Backups have the .bak extension. You can remove the original save files and remove the .bak from the filename to use those instead.  But as soon as you load your game, those backups are replaced.  That means they are no longer useful if your save was corrupted.

 

[InfiniteWarrior]

I feel ya. Lost power for a few seconds last week (battery didn't kick in for some reason), loaded back in and I was level 1 as though starting a new playthrough with no skills and no recipes and no gear and zombies swarming the spawn area. Looked and found my converted POI, workstations and all, utterly unaffected. The avatar was just starting over from scratch, initial "challenges" and all, whereas I'd been around level 7 when the power went out. Went down the street and found the bike right where I'd left it as I'd been clearing the Book Barn. Scuttled the save.

Manual saves shouldn't be required for contingencies such as these, but I wouldn't know how to implement a save that could be rolled back to from the menu. I always loaded a hard save in BGS games rather than an autosave because...well, you know, but this is not a single player game. I'm actually amazed you can even pause it.

 

[theFlu]

Backups have the .bak extension. You can remove the original save files and remove the .bak from the filename to use those instead. 

I didn't even know this was a thing, good to know. It does sound like it could use a script or some other automated mechanic to restore (renaming several files manually doesn't sound like a fool-proof solution.. and I might be a fool ) Would there happen to be one of those as well?

 

[Riamus]

I didn't even know this was a thing, good to know. It does sound like it could use a script or some other automated mechanic to restore (renaming several files manually doesn't sound like a fool-proof solution.. and I might be a fool ) Would there happen to be one of those as well?

Not that I am aware of.  But I think there are mods to do backups, so they might also do restores.

TFP have said they are trying to improve saves, but no idea when that will happen or if it will work well.  Having the game know that it crashed and ask you if you want to load a backup instead of loading the active save when that happens would be a good start.

 

[theFlu]

Having the game know that it crashed and ask you if you want to load a backup instead of loading the active save when that happens would be a good start.

That would be pretty nifty, and probably cover a big chunk of the corruption cases; at least the ones you hear on the forums tend to start with, "So, my game crashed..".

Thanks for the info