Save files are corrupted

[Lantea]

I've never had to deal with it in my game, either, but I assure you there were quite a few people that wound up with inventory issues because of this inherent limitation of the engine. There were even some members of the community that built a utility to help (PC players at least) recover a functional save if it happened. But there is no "fix" for it -- it's just not how the game was designed. It sounds like it may be a manifestation of the same type of thing here.

So what you are saying is the devs learned absolutely nothing from The Witcher 3 and the issues save files caused there, and they just went ahead and screwed the new game from the start once again. Does not seem very wise;

If people are having these save issue just a few days after the game is released if this is not fixed asap there is a huge shitstorm coming towards the devs once tens of thousand of users start having these save issue as they progress through the game; its not a question of 'if' it happens but rather 'when' and for the sake of CDPR lets hope they have a solution before then.

 

[OctoberFNRaven]

Generally speaking, it is a very rare things for a save file to be salvageable after it's corrupted. Offhand I can think of only one game where it was possible, Beyond Divinity.

Not to mention that the dev team is probably working all nighters to improve on the game as it is. Fixing a corrupted save now might just mean fixing it again later once it's already fixed.

They're likely also under a lot of pressure because, and I'm speaking in general terms, when firings happen they usually happen from the bottom up. And I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of them are going to be spending the 25th at their desk, debugging away, eating cold pizza left over from last night because nobody else is open. (And if so, I hope it's at least good pizza. Google tells me there's no Papa John's in Poland, so that's a good sign!).

As to what the moderators are saying, no, they are most definitely not saying don't use the crafting mechanic. What they are saying is don't farm with it right now, which is a totally different thing. "Don't drive your car off a ravine" is not the same as "Don't drive your car".

Lastly, canned replies from tech support on ongoing issues is normal for known ongoing issues. Sometimes there's nothing customer-facing people can do other than say it's being worked on. It sucks, and as someone who worked in customer service, it also sucks to have to tell people. But they're not wizards.

It sucks that people are losing their progress, and it absolutely should be fixed ASAP, but that doesn't give them the right to take it out on someone who had absolutely nothing to do with it.

 

[oshul]

All of your saves are around 4mb for me. I tried loading a few, but yeah, they all say they're corrupted.

Post automatically merged: Dec 19, 2020

I'm not sure how the game handles generating cans from the vending machines so I have no idea. It could potentially cause the same bloat as crafting since it's generating new items.

 

[hulkman2456]

It's gotta be because of the crafting. I beat CP in 44 hours. I have 133,000 eddies. But in my first run, I basically never crafted stuff. I did dissameble and upgrade gear. But crafting, I couldn't because i never reached the required level to do a lot fo them. So I didn't bother. My save file is just over 5MB.

 

[igrvks]

If I buy a Dodge pick-up, then try to outrun a Ferrari...I'm gonna lose. Every single time. If I try to haul a grand piano with a Ferrari...it's not gonna fit. Ever. That's not anyone's "fault". I'm just trying to use the machine for something it wasn't designed to do.

This would be a valid point if Dodge advertised that pickup having a "ferrari slayer mode" as a feature. Or if Ferrari was making a point how their 488 Pista can be used for piano hauling duties.

There is not a single line in the marketing material or within the game itself that using one of it's main skills and features too much will destroy your entire process. Neither is there any warning that the player should aim to complete the story within a timeframe of 50-80 hours. If that was the case they would had hard coded a time limit within the relic/silverhand system where the relic bluescreens you and credits roll when you reach certain hours played and if you cant reach the end by that time limit then you must try with another character.

I have not done ANY duplication glitches, and only crafted items and quickhacks for personal use, total amount for crafted items is less than 100. I disassemble everything I don't need and store unused clothing and surplus of materials in my stash. My game time is somewhere around 60 hours and my latest save file is 4.97mb at level 34. Earliest manual save I have is at level 18 and the save file is already 3.05mb so this is clearly not just about duplicating or mass crafting thousands of items.

This 8mb limit is objectively a gigantic issue for a game like this and if the reasoning is indeed that this game was designed to be this way CDPR better add some huge ass disclaimers about it in the beginning so at least some players will be able to avoid flushing dozens of hours of their free time literally down the drain by not allowing them to complete a role playing game in a way they want.

I will personally stop playing this game entirely effective immediately until this issue is resolved. My free time is way too valuable for me to corrupt a 60+ hour save and start from the beginning.

 

[MojoBreaker]

what about hoarders ? can i collect tons of weapons, clothes and other junk in my apartment storage ? or filling storage also gets save file RIP

 

[Gumwars]

I've done QA testing for industrial SCADA applications. This appears to be a database issue, a common one I've run into. The table for persistent items isn't dynamic, it's likely a fixed and very large number. Once full, the save file corrupts on load. If there was a way to edit the save file by reducing the item table's contents, then we should be back in business. However, I believe that if CDPR doesn't address this issue, the problem will eventually hit more players as they get deeper into the game.

Selling/dropping items won't help; the table appears to only use an entry once and doesn't purge it after the player gets rid of the item. Meaning, even if you get rid of stuff, the entry in the table is still there. Eventually the table will fill and the save.dat will corrupt. I believe the only interim solution is to limit crafting, don't pick up everything you see, and wait for CDPR to fix this. A solution might take a while if it means a database schema rework. Making the table dynamic could also work, but that might have other impacts like taking forever for a game to load. A garbage collector is probably what they'll go with, some function that purges entries when the player sells, uses, crafts, or drops an item. It seems like the table size is good for dozens of hours of play, which lends to the idea that they just need to implement a function that cleans things up when the program closes, or when you save.

Unfortunately, I'd imagine their resources are tied up fixing the last-gen console versions right now. This might end up waiting until next year, or when too many PC players hit this wall.

Hey @CDPR, you might want to fix this before the PC side gets hit too hard by it.

 

[Ianto1]

what about hoarders ? can i collect tons of weapons, clothes and other junk in my apartment storage ? or filling storage also gets save file RIP

There is another issue (possibly unrelated) to storage as well. Put too many items in it and stuff will start to disappear. However, if this happens remove everything you can from your storage and eventually those items will show up again. As such, there seems to be a limit on how much you can put into your storage without it breaking, not sure what the exact number is.

 

[Raze4573]

Ok, I logged in just to say this. 8Mb save file breaks the progress? Save file corruption because of item hoarding?
I'm sorry but did CDPR somehow morphed into Bethesda along the way to Cyberpunks release?
And the audacity to blame users for using a mechanic? Are you for real? We've waited since 2013 on this game, 2018 stuff got us even more excited and now we get this half baked sorry excuse for an open world rpg, I'm sorry ACTION ADVENTURE game?
I work at a game store, I've seen a ton of refund demands, my friends also considered it, some have done it, me, I got the CE and I'm only NOT getting a refund for the game because the collector edition stuff is actual high quality.
There was passion put into making the physical stuff and I adore all of it.
BUT ... honestly, hearing about this save file snafu and the concept itself that we need to be careful the file size, yeah no, not interested in any other game CDPR has in the oven.
After TW2 and TW3, we knew you can make good stuff, even if bugged but this? This isnt an AAA title, this is 'Baby's First Big Budget Game'.
And the thing is, I'm not mad... I'm just disappointed.

 

[Gulosz]

Ok, I logged in just to say this. 8Mb save file breaks the progress? Save file corruption because of item hoarding?
I'm sorry but did CDPR somehow morphed into Bethesda along the way to Cyberpunks release?
And the audacity to blame users for using a mechanic? Are you for real? We've waited since 2013 on this game, 2018 stuff got us even more excited and now we get this half baked sorry excuse for an open world rpg, I'm sorry ACTION ADVENTURE game?
I work at a game store, I've seen a ton of refund demands, my friends also considered it, some have done it, me, I got the CE and I'm only NOT getting a refund for the game because the collector edition stuff is actual high quality.
There was passion put into making the physical stuff and I adore all of it.
BUT ... honestly, hearing about this save file snafu and the concept itself that we need to be careful the file size, yeah no, not interested in any other game CDPR has in the oven.
After TW2 and TW3, we knew you can make good stuff, even if bugged but this? This isnt an AAA title, this is 'Baby's First Big Budget Game'.
And the thing is, I'm not mad... I'm just disappointed.

First of all, this bug occurs when you heavily cheat in game i.e use crafting exploits.
There were several discussions between players on other forums and this occurs ONLY when you cheat, so thats OP's fault of his own using bugged exploits.

Secondly, [...] first sentence would be enough to put forward your thoughts.

 

[rmac]

First of all, this bug occurs when you heavily cheat in game i.e use crafting exploits.
There were several discussions between players on other forums and this occurs ONLY when you cheat, so thats OP's fault of his own using bugged exploits.

Secondly, [...] first sentence would be enough to put forward your thoughts.

This is blatantly false and needs to stop being memed by users who have not yet been impacted by this serious bug and are rushing to defend CD Projeckt. If you're going to make vague references to other forums only referencing exploits, there's tons of discussion on Reddit and Steam saying the opposite. People who never touched crafting or exploits. I'd imagine looting items and selling/destroying them might be impacting this save bloat too if the current theories are more right than wrong. There's been no real comment on this outside of the support article.

This happened to me during regular play, no exploits, after 70 hours of progress. Yes some users are really angry, but this is perhaps the first REAL game breaking issue that's been found and it's not getting taking seriously enough yet.

 

[Karpusi]

Just stumbled over this discussion.
Having the same issue right now, but my files are only around 3-4MB big so its not the file size for me.
Rly, i was so happy to just get to see a few T-Poses and minor bugs that were acceptable but this... this makes me just so angry, spending 2-3 days off of my universtiy project in myalready limited free time to just lose all my progress?
I am actually thinking about deinstalling this crapfor now and wait until next year, hoping CDRP might get anything fixed at all

(I am playing via GOG, cloudsaves active. I never craftzed until now, only played around 20h and mighthave finished around 6-7 main missions, mainly driving around, enjoyoing the city and doing some sidemissions and gigs so far. never used any exploit bugs or shit like this)

 

[Gulosz]

This is blatantly false and needs to stop being memed by users who have not yet been impacted by this serious bug and are rushing to defend CD Projeckt. If you're going to make vague references to other forums only referencing exploits, there's tons of discussion on Reddit and Steam saying the opposite. People who never touched crafting or exploits. I'd imagine looting items and selling/destroying them might be impacting this save bloat too if the current theories are more right than wrong. There's been no real comment on this outside of the support article.

This happened to me during regular play, no exploits, after 70 hours of progress. Yes some users are really angry, but this is perhaps the first REAL game breaking issue that's been found and it's not getting taking seriously enough yet.

I dont know, I cant agree as I am 36h in and didnt progress much into act 2 and all i did so far was do gigs, side missions, random gang fights, collecting items across the world, pick up pretty much all items in each quest to disassemble it and sell, crafted lots of items and my save never exceeded 4.1mb

 

[Karpusi]

I dont know, I cant agree as I am 36h in and didnt progress much into act 2 and all i did so far was do gigs, side missions, random gang fights, collecting items across the world, pick up pretty much all items in each quest to disassemble it and sell, crafted lots of items and my save never exceeded 4.1mb

Thats exactly the same I did only that I am facing the complete loss of save games right now. So, NO its not the use of cheats or whatever, some of us just try to enjoy this excuse for 8 years of development but cant because of this shit

 

[Gulosz]

Thats exactly the same I did only that I am facing the complete loss of save games right now. So, NO its not the use of cheats or whatever, some of us just try to enjoy this excuse for 8 years of development but cant because of this shit

Well, it actually has been in development for 4 years, from the moment team has finished Blood and Wine expansion for W3, anything prior to that was pre-development process for arts, scenario etc.
Which isnt really important right now...

Makes me wonder, did you or anyone experiencing this issue use manual saves, quick saves (F5) or mis or both?
I never used quick save and always do new separate manual save, in some ocassions overwrite previous ones.


Apparently quick saves add more size into save file, but if its not related to file size it may be related to quick save corrupting save files?

 

[Anemoneechan]

First of all, this bug occurs when you heavily cheat in game i.e use crafting exploits.
There were several discussions between players on other forums and this occurs ONLY when you cheat, so thats OP's fault of his own using bugged exploits.

Secondly, [...] first sentence would be enough to put forward your thoughts.

It isn't limited to duplication; people who craft and loot frequently are at a higher risk of running into this problem. I crafted 400 grenades to test out how it'd influence my filesize:

Before crafting: 5069KB
After crafting: 5192KB
After disassembling: 5173KB
After selling all components: 5135KB

I did all of this in the same area without doing anything else in-between. I saved while standing and looking at the same place. I skipped time to reset vendors. My file size permanently went up by 66KB, at minimum, by generating 400 items. I've had to make way more than this to level my crafting and upgrade my weapons, to say nothing of the many thousands of items I've picked up off of enemies and the environment.

I absolutely have not used the duplication glitch and I haven't bothered "abusing" crafting for money, unless you count occasionally selling components I've accumulated from disassembling loot. Sure, I could stop playing the game the way I'm playing it now (which would really hurt the fun for me), but my response to you isn't about that: it's about how you've pinned this solely on cheating. That is not the case; crafting and looting will definitely bloat the game over time, and people who like to do a lot of both of these are at risk.

For the record, I've completed about 35-40% of the map icons and I think I'm somewhere around halfway through the main story quest. I have 3MB left before my save is corrupted, which may or may not run out by the time I'm done, but it feels more close than I'm comfortable with.

 

[HiroTsukamoto]

First of all, this bug occurs when you heavily cheat in game i.e use crafting exploits.
There were several discussions between players on other forums and this occurs ONLY when you cheat, so thats OP's fault of his own using bugged exploits.

Secondly, [...] first sentence would be enough to put forward your thoughts.

I can just shake my head about this comment...
I never cheated, i just used the ingame mechanics very very much and it broke. I used not a single exploit.
What you write is just stupid and simply wrong it does not occure when you cheat.

This is blatantly false and needs to stop being memed by users who have not yet been impacted by this serious bug and are rushing to defend CD Projeckt. If you're going to make vague references to other forums only referencing exploits, there's tons of discussion on Reddit and Steam saying the opposite. People who never touched crafting or exploits. I'd imagine looting items and selling/destroying them might be impacting this save bloat too if the current theories are more right than wrong. There's been no real comment on this outside of the support article.

This happened to me during regular play, no exploits, after 70 hours of progress. Yes some users are really angry, but this is perhaps the first REAL game breaking issue that's been found and it's not getting taking seriously enough yet.

Thank you!

I dont know, I cant agree as I am 36h in and didnt progress much into act 2 and all i did so far was do gigs, side missions, random gang fights, collecting items across the world, pick up pretty much all items in each quest to disassemble it and sell, crafted lots of items and my save never exceeded 4.1mb

"crafted lot of items" is a point of view.
I crafted approx 50k - 60k things. Ingame, without cheats or exploits or whatever, just with the crafting system...

 

[Karpusi]

Well, it actually has been in development for 4 years, from the moment team has finished Blood and Wine expansion for W3, anything prior to that was pre-development process for arts, scenario etc.
Which isnt really important right now...

Makes me wonder, did you or anyone experiencing this issue use manual saves, quick saves (F5) or mis or both?
I never used quick save and always do new separate manual save, in some ocassions overwrite previous ones.


Apparently quick saves add more size into save file, but if its not related to file size it may be related to quick save corrupting save files?

All my saves are corrupted as it seems. i mainly used quicksave, but the Autosaves as well as the few manual saves i did in between are corrupted as well. i backuped them and than tried them all, not a fckn single save is loadable.
Right now i am reinstalling the game cause some pplsin some forums said it might be a problem wit hthe way the game loads the files, not the files itself, but i dont rly thing this will fix anything.
as soon as it is reinstalled, i will disable the cloud save function and try to load the backuped savegames, if this will change anything i will tell u

 

[Gulosz]

It isn't limited to duplication; people who craft and loot frequently are at a higher risk of running into this problem. I crafted 400 grenades to test out how it'd influence my filesize:

Before crafting: 5069KB
After crafting: 5192KB
After disassembling: 5173KB
After selling all components: 5135KB

I did all of this in the same area without doing anything else in-between. I saved while standing and looking at the same place. I skipped time to reset vendors. My file size permanently went up by 66KB, at minimum, by generating 400 items. I've had to make way more than this to level my crafting and upgrade my weapons, to say nothing of the many thousands of items I've picked up off of enemies and the environment.

I absolutely have not used the duplication glitch and I haven't bothered "abusing" crafting for money, unless you count occasionally selling components I've accumulated from disassembling loot. Sure, I could stop playing the game the way I'm playing it now (which would really hurt the fun for me), but my response to you isn't about that: it's about how you've pinned this solely on cheating. That is not the case; crafting and looting will definitely bloat the game over time, and people who like to do a lot of both of these are at risk.

For the record, I've completed about 35-40% of the map icons and I think I'm somewhere around halfway through the main story quest. I have 3MB left before my save is corrupted, which may or may not run out by the time I'm done, but it feels more close than I'm comfortable with.

Yes sorry my response was rude, though thats what seemed to be caused by in majority of scenarios.

We can rule out 8mb file size now though as apparently people get their saves corrupted even when at 4mb so there must be something more specific that is causing this than size itself.

Post automatically merged: Dec 19, 2020

All my saves are corrupted as it seems. i mainly used quicksave, but the Autosaves as well as the few manual saves i did in between are corrupted as well. i backuped them and than tried them all, not a fckn single save is loadable.
Right now i am reinstalling the game cause some pplsin some forums said it might be a problem wit hthe way the game loads the files, not the files itself, but i dont rly thing this will fix anything.
as soon as it is reinstalled, i will disable the cloud save function and try to load the backuped savegames, if this will change anything i will tell u

So if you backed files and put them back in (which worked prior to corruption) then this cant have anything to do with the files themselved - maybe its cloud saves as you say or some sort of 'game state' value actual game files hold post file corruption....

Let us know.





@Edit:
Just seen this dude's post on steam forums which seems to be very reasonable explanation why this may be happening:

Graf Erik:
"Well, okay. I took my time to read through this.

By the look of it its not an issue of generaly playing very long, or having a large inventory.
Instead it seems that someone found a way to create a perpetuum mobile of crafting by combining certain perks (and then he put that on youtube). Some perks lower the amount of components needed for crafting, some increase the amount of components gained by salvaging. Put both together and you get can craft, then salvage and come out with more comps then you had before.
While this is probably the most boring possible way to play the game, it allowes you theoreticaly to create an infinite number of items (that you can then sell for money).
Theoreticaly.
Practically every crafted item gets a unique id number, and once the game runs out of id numbers to assign, writing them to the save file corrupts it.
Everone who got this problem mass-crafted several ten-thousands of items.
As long as you don't do this, you should be fine. "

 

[Azulath]

I've been following this thread since yesterday and I am really concerned about this issue, but I'd also like to offer additional input/insight:

• At the very start of this thread, someone argued that loading save files would corrupt them. This is almost certainly not the case. I calculated the hash of my quicksave before and after I loaded it and both times the result was the same.
• This issue was compared with W3 and I had a look at my W3 saves. My very first save which I did as soon as I was able to save, is about 17KiB in size. My last and largest saves, with everything completed there is to complete has 4.5MiB. I would also like to add that I picked up every item because in games like these I am a hoarder and I usually use mods that disable the weight limit. However, aside from the Witcher gear and some runes I did not really craft anything. (I had three playthroughs and this error never occurred.)
• My very first CP2077 has 1.05MiB and my current one has 1.45MiB. (I just met Viktor to install my Cyberware)
• In my W3 palythroughs I did noticed that opening the load screen did take quite a while. However, I was able to fix this by just moving every save file out of the folder, with the exception of the most recent one.

Regarding CP2077, I'm currently at a point where I am afraid to keep on playing. I did intend to craft a bit, because I did not want to run around with weird clothes that don't fit together. (I do this enough in real life.) So, I wanted to just upgrade gear that looks cool. Also, I am one who looks under every stone and behind every corner. I do want to see everything and anything on my first playthrough and I do not accept the notion of just having multiple playthroughs as it has been suggested earlier. I will tackle it a few times, but in all of them I will strive for 100%.

Furthermore, I there are already problems with the savegame size and CDPR has no intention to fix it, then they should also re-evaluate their content-DLC plans.

While I do find this issue severe, I also hope that this does not end in a lawsuit as someone else expressed his hope for. This would hurt CDPR badly to a degree where probably wouldn't see a sequel. However, I also doubt this will happen anyway.

That being said, I am unsure if I should continue playing and before stumbling over this issue, I never considered to get a refund for my game. Now, I'm not so sure. The thing is, I have pre-ordered the game and would do so again because I wanted to support the development. At this point though, it is unclear if/when this error will be fixed and if I were to put my money where my mouth is, I would get a refund...

Last but not least, I encourage each and everyone who is having this issue to report it. I would report it on the page linked below because it has a "Contact Us" button, while the other one has a useless message.

I am unable to save the game — Cyberpunk 2077 | Technical Support — CD PROJEKT RED

Welcome to CD PROJEKT RED Technical Support! Here you will find help regarding our games and services, as well as answers to frequently asked questions.

support.cdprojektred.com

Regarding a possible fix, I read the uint16 suggestion and this sounds like it could be the issue. If this is the case, I think the fix wouldn't be too difficult and not that error prone. One could change this type to uint32 and add a converter for older savegames. The problem here would be that each item in memory consumes 2 Bytes additionally. This would of course increase the memory usage and probably exceed the console target, so they would have to reduce memory usage in some other area.
Another way would be to have savetrim tool that gets triggered on load when a savegame is larger than 4MiB for example.

Anyway, I hope this will be addressed soon in some way, because other than that I really do enjoy this game.

P.S.: Please don't post any kind of spoilers in this thread. As you can tell, I'm still at the very start.