This need to be fixed NOW before christmas not in january and definitely not in february its gamebreaking bug its not some random T-pose game is simply broken and some point my latest save is 4,481kb i crafted only once ammo and two times upgraded my revolver i did side stuff and Pacifica main quests at this speed of save growning i doubt i will complete game before 8mb save. If they cant fix this before christmass they should now work 24h per day if they need to maybe i am brutal here but i dont care that they are exhausted after crunch i paid them for the game its not free to play so i expect to game at least work because game is amazing. But they failed to deliver properly working product they should delay it to 2021 after october if they knew about this bug if they didn't know about this bug how the hell they tested this game and how the hell happend? I played all their games since launch never had this type of issue.
This. Its not like someone has 10.000 pistols in stash. It seems it's the 10.000 pistols you encounter during whole game that is not GCed that's causing the bloat.
Char inventory is limited by weight. Stash isn't, but they could do some limitations i.e to 500 or 1000 unique items in stash to be sure we don't hit 8MB limit.
On the other hand - they planned expansions right? File saves without any crafting and far from 100% of all quests are over 5-6MB already. So someone inside must have known there will be problem down the line anyway.
Most of this is true. However this 8MB save limit doesn't seem to be directly engine limitation.
Why I think so? - there is no problem in runtime. You can craft/dismantle/do quests/whatever and there is no problem with handling the data in memory untill you want to save it.
During play there is no magic moment the engine gives up and you have suddenly have 5fps and items start dissapering form your inventory.
All works well untill you need to save. Its like inventory buffer in RAM is working ok, but flushing it to file is broken.
For all we know loading is working correct. Its the saving that doesnt write file over 8MB correctly and its missing EOF thats broken.
This is why I think it has nothing to do with ItemID limit.
8MB+ corrupted save writing is one bug.
ItemID bloat is other thing.
But the first one could be caused by the second one. Maybe if they do proper GC on save then 8MB might be enough.
I remember reading that, and I took it into consideration when I made my post. If it wasn't apparent I apologize. Because of the issues with REDengine 3 and itemIDs in the past, and crafters being hit the hardest by save file bloat, it made sense to me that it was possible that these itemIDs were causing the bloat, since it was proven in REDengine 3 that the game held on to itemIDs even after the player had long gotten rid of the item. So instead of holding on to itemIDs until the game reached the Uint16 limit, the game was holding on to itemIDs until the save file size limit was reached.
Also, I 100% agree that a garbage collector on the data would help with the issue, if these ghost itemIDs were indeed the problem. I'm just curious now as to why this issue has been allowed to exist from REDengine 3 to REDengine 4. To me, and my limited knowledge, it would have made sense to me to fix the game holding on to phantom itemIDs when data was written from memory to file. This would have solved the itemID overflow issue in TW3, but also may have prevented the save file bloat issue we see now in Cyberpunk.
Again, all of this hinges on itemIDs being the issue. I'm trying to get in touch with people in my limited gaming circles that play cyberpunk who have spec'd into crafting so I can have them spam craft items then save to see how it affects save file size.
This. Its not like someone has 10.000 pistols in stash. It seems it's the 10.000 pistols you encounter during whole game that is not GCed thats causing the bloat.
Char inventory is limited by weight. Stash isnt, but they could do some limitations i.e to 500 or 1000 unique items in stash to be sure we dont hit 8MB limit.
The pistols dropped by enemies is a strong possibility. In regards to the character weight limit. It's possible to exceed the weight limit vastly. You can't move, but, you can have 20k lbs in your inventory and there's no real restriction other than in game movement. The game wont hard stop you because of limited inventory space like there exists in other games.
Most of this is true. However this 8MB save limit doesn't seem to be directly engine limitation.
Why I think so? - there is no problem in runtime. You can craft/dismantle/do quests/whatever and there is no problem with handling the data in memory until you want to save it and load it.
During play there is no magic moment the engine gives up and you have suddenly have 5fps and items start disappearing from your inventory.
All works well until you need to save. Its like inventory buffer in RAM is working ok, but flushing it to file is broken.
For all we know loading is working correct. Its the saving that doesn't write file over 8MB correctly and its missing EOF thats broken.
This is why I think it has nothing to do with ItemID limit.
8MB+ corrupted save writing is one bug.
ItemID bloat is other thing.
But the first one could be caused by the second one. Maybe if they do proper GC on save then 8MB might be enough.
Absolutely this. You can see there's more than one issue going on from what's been discovered in the thread, but because one issue inevitably leads to the other one, people blur it together and think it's the same issue.
Wrong. There is no sure way to know what is happening with inventory state / Items-ID DB in save as long as there is no save editor.
Everything in this topic is anecdotal evidence at best. Everyone is getting different values, sometimes selling/dismantling items reduce save, sometimes not. There is so many things happening in the background beside crafting that its very hard to get any reliable data. If sleeping reduces save size sometimes that means there is some kind of cleaning.
Since its unknown what items and for how much causes size to grow, even if you don't craft maybe you will get some lucky drops and get some epic items with mods that will cause your save to grow 3 times more than crafting 100 grenades.
Who knows what is better - not pickup weapons from enemies? Pickup and sell? Pickup and dismantle? Over 1 hour of game-play you do so many things in game, that without any debugging tool its just blind guessing.
Okay, so the problem is more complicated than I though. I'm gonna have to be very cautious at my savefiles and see if I notice any major change as I'm progressing.
Yes you are....
So the save game is constantly bloating... Everything you do bloats the save game a little bit.
Crafting is the only thing that has been confirmed to bloat the save game at a rapid pace compared to the normal level of bloat you see just playing the game.
The people that are going to run into this issue are likely the following:
People who craft a lot
People who horde EVERYTHING
People who put 100+ hours into one character.
Completionists who want to finish everything available to do in this game 100%
The bottom line is your save game will inevitably bloat to the point where it corrupts itself.
But for most people (barring super crafters) this is going to take over 100 hours being put into the same character.
If you finish a playthrough before the 100 hour mark and don't plan to go back, to said playthrough at any point, you will likely NOT see this error ever come up (unless you crafted a ton).
But for anyone that puts many hours into one character, this is a gamebreaking issue, ESPECIALLY if they want to use the crafting system efficiently.
EDIT: I should also mention the 100 hours I keep referring to is a rough ballpark based on my playthrough with minimal crafting.
I am sitting at 101 hours and my save file has just recently hit 6MB
I kept a close look to the savefiles as I was playing a moment ago and I indeed saw that it grows in weight just by playing the game (even if I'm not crafting/picking up items). So yeah, technically this is something that's bound to happen to everyone sooner or later should you spend enough time on the game.
I also made some rough math to see how quickly it would take me to reach the 8mb mark provided Ithe savefile was growing at the same rate all the time and I came up with something similar (100 hours of gameplay left or so).
And as surprising as it sound, it's not even that much. This is a pretty long game and an RPG to boot. I remember spending far more than 100 hours on Skyrim, for example, so, definitely a huge problem that needs fixing.
The REDengine, historically, has an issue of holding on to itemIDs even if you get rid of the items. Until this can be disproven, we can't discount that this is still happening in Cyberpunk, as it did in The Witcher 3. If the game is indeed holding on to itemIDs, then it's possible these itemIDs are causing the save file to increase in size. When the game tries to write to the save and it exceeds 8192MB, it writes to the file, but it omits the End of File marker. Either this is by design, due to file size limitations, or it's a bug in the application. Loading the saves, hypothetically, still function as normal, they just can't load save files missing that End of File marker, because it's seen as an incomplete file, so the game rejects it.
So the working hypothesis is that there are possibly two issues going on here:
1.) Save file bloat (Either caused by itemIDs, or other information, expanding the size of save files)
2.) Problems writing save files larger than 8192KB
It's been pointed out a few times that one issue could be causing the other. Many people feel that increasing the save file size will solve the problem. However, that will only prolong the inevitable. Like V in Cyberpunk, your save file is living on borrowed time. The real issue is the bloat, whether it's from itemIDs, which I feel plays a big part of it, but is not the sole contributor, or from other data.
If we fix the bloat, we won't ever need to worry about an 8MB size limit, because we will never go over it.
Edit: After thinking about it more, I believe that the game omitting the EOF marker when writing to a save file that exceeds 8192KB is in fact a bug and not by design. Even if the save file size is set to 8MB, the game shouldn't be able to write to file if the data in memory exceeds that size. There should have been some kind of check in place to ensure that this didn't happen.
Just pitching in to say I've hit the 8MB limit, and I did not craft a bunch of weapons, managed to do it solely by crafting consumables (grenades and healing items)
So be aware that although weapons accelerate the bloat significantly, consumables will get you too.
The REDengine, historically, has an issue of holding on to itemIDs even if you get rid of the items. Until this can be disproven, we can't discount that this is still happening in Cyberpunk, as it did in The Witcher 3. If the game is indeed holding on to itemIDs, then it's possible these itemIDs are causing the save file to increase in size. When the game tries to write to the save and it exceeds 8192MB, it writes to the file, but it omits the End of File marker. Either this is by design, due to file size limitations, or it's a bug in the application. Loading the saves, hypothetically, still function as normal, they just can't load save files missing that End of File marker, because it's seen as an incomplete file, so the game rejects it.
So the working hypothesis is that there are possibly two issues going on here:
1.) Save file bloat (Either caused by itemIDs, or other information, expanding the size of save files)
2.) Problems writing save files larger than 8192KB
It's been pointed out a few times that one issue could be causing the other. Many people feel that increasing the save file size will solve the problem. However, that will only prolong the inevitable. Like V in Cyberpunk, your save file is living on borrowed time. The real issue is the bloat, whether it's from itemIDs, which I feel plays a big part of it, but is not the sole contributor, or from other data.
If we fix the bloat, we won't ever need to worry about an 8MB size limit, because we will never go over it.
And not to mention that if they didn't fix the save file bloat, starting from 5.5mb, there will be black screens (ranging from 10 secs to 2minutes depending on how close you are to the 8mb limit as reported in this thread) while loading it initially so it's really a messy problem.
Does anyone know if this is affecting console saves as well specifically PS4 systems? My save files all say 12.59mbs and the user profile is at 4.20mb haven't seen any issues with save file corruption atm.
Does anyone know if this is affecting console saves as well specifically PS4 systems? My save files all say 12.59mbs and the user profile is at 4.20mb haven't seen any issues with save file corruption atm.
It may very well affect consoles. We've had some reports of people not being able to load their playstation saves.
Unfortunately, you only see the alloted space for your savegame (which is 12.59mb) for playstation
So you're sitting on a possible ticking time bomb with a broken timer display.
It may very well affect consoles. We've had some reports of people not being able to load their playstation saves.
Unfortunately, you only see the alloted space for your savegame (which is 12.59mb) for playstation
So you're sitting on a possible ticking time bomb with a broken timer display.
It may very well affect consoles. We've had some reports of people not being able to load their playstation saves.
Unfortunately, you only see the alloted space for your savegame (which is 12.59mb) for playstation
So you're sitting on a possible ticking time bomb with a broken timer display.
I know it's been mentioned in the post earlier, but, Microsoft console users can delete all but their manual save to see the file size of their save. The Xbox consoles, for some reason, by default report the total file sizes for all files and wont let you drill down to the individual files unless you remove all other files.
1.- What can we do to prevent this?
2.- Realistically how likely is for someone to achieve the 8mb threshold?
3.- Does this happen only to those who used duplication exploits or this can happen to anyone who just plays the game organically or "as intended"?.
I currently have 31 hours accumulated in the game and my save is 3.62mb. No exploits and the main quest is far from done. Actually I'm very poor in the game and I want to buy a new car and clothes, so I'm grinding NCPD bounties and Gigs. I haven't crafted anything because I didn't knew you could craft stuff. I'm really taking my time with this game, I'm exploring and doing Side Jobs. I actually don't like hoarding items, I sell or dismantle guns I don't want and improve the ones I like, I have a pistol, two snipers and one rifle, because I'm role playing as a hitman, a very poor hitman actually xD
I'm afraid of continue playing because I want to take my time, but I don't understand if progressing organically and slow through the game could still corrupt my save file and it's just people who are using exploits the ones getting faster to the point where we all will eventually get if we continue playing.
I know it's been mentioned in the post earlier, but, Microsoft console users can delete all but their manual save to see the file size of their save. The Xbox consoles, for some reason, by default report the total file sizes for all files and wont let you drill down to the individual files unless you remove all other files.
This seems like horrible advice if you find out the only save left, is a broken save. Great for our information to know when it breaks on xbox. But not worth throwing away all your saves (can you backup saves on xbox?)
1.- What can we do to prevent this?
2.- Realistically how likely is for someone to achieve the 8mb threshold?
3.- Does this happen only to those who used duplication exploits or this can happen to anyone who just plays the game organically or "as intended"?.
I currently have 31 hours accumulated in the game and my save is 3.62mb. No exploits and the main quest is far from done. Actually I'm very poor in the game and I want to buy a new car and clothes, so I'm grinding NCPD bounties and Gigs. I haven't crafted anything because I didn't knew you could craft stuff. I'm really taking my time with this game, I'm exploring and doing Side Jobs. I actually don't like hoarding items, I sell or dismantle guns I don't want and improve the ones I like, I have a pistol, two snipers and one rifle, because I'm role playing as a hitman, a very poor hitman actually xD
I'm afraid of continue playing because I want to take my time, but I don't understand if progressing organically and slow through the game could still corrupt my save file, it's just that people using exploits are the ones getting faster to the point where we all will eventually get if we continue playing.
TLDR: Until fixed, don't craft anything, keep component count low, clean your inventory rigorously. [stash counts too]
According to them Crafting anything causes savegame bloat. Creating consumables impacts the bloat less than creating equippable gear.
Both will increase savegame bloat.
Disassembling seems to only cause bloat by increasing the component count, decreasing component count should fix that. So it ought to be save to disassemble things.
Reducing inventory size (components are part of your inv aswell) can mitigate the issue and reduce your savegame file.
Be sure to use the wait/skip time function in game to reset store inventories/deload dropped items (components can only be sold or used, where using them would increase the "currently" permanent bloat)
In some cases selling items may get them to be stuck permanetly in a buy back inventory.
So be mindful of that too when cleaning inventory.
Anything in stash is also part of your inv, so clean that out too if like me you've got an impressive wardrobe in there.
This may help you reduce your savegame bloat to the point where you can play for a while.
I wrote before what you can do. Tried to like link to it. Not sure if this'll work.
Anyway, a quick [tldr]
Don't craft anything, will prevent this from hitting you fast.
Playing the game doing things, the random events, everything really, adds to the bloat, slowly creeping.
So if you want to avoid this. Don't play.
If you want to mitigate it. Don't craft, disassemble, and keep inv as empty as you can. (stash too) sell components, as they're part of your inventory.
How likely is this: if you're playing without using crafting it's most likely possible to play the entire game 100% and do the story quests. and you'd probably not hit it. If you faff about and just enjoy the world on the other hand. We don't know yet, but probably you'll hit a limit eventually.
As for who it affects. Everyone.
Us crafters, and those duplicating/crafting, just hit it first since crafting/duplicating is a big offender of the savegame bloat. But it happens passively too.
PC users can easily keep track of their sav.dat filesizes (located in users/<username>/saved games/CD Projekt Red/Cyberpunk 2077 (or something like that))
Playstation users can't see how close they are.
Xbox users need to remove other saves to leave 1 and see the size of that one (not a bright idea if it's corrupted in my opinion)
Starting from 5.5MB (ish) (On the PC atleast, haven't heard of consoles having this yet) you start getting a black screen before the game starts to load. Starts off not lasting long but the closer you get to the file limit, the longer it lasts. It lasts up to 2 minutes. (what I've noticed)
As of 1.05 instead of receiving a message that your save is corrupted, it just infinitely hangs on the black screen. (lovely that)
There is some talk of Item ID's being exhausted. I have my doubts but it's a possiblity. (I think we'd see more consistent bloat between saves if it consistently re-assigns ids to our inventory items)
When I load a save I have dialogue from subtitles stuck at the bottom of my screen. Even if I turn off subtitles it is still stuck there. If I load an old save it's gone but when I save again and load that NEW save it is back. Anyone have this or know what to try to fix it? Thank you.
I wonder if the reason why we haven't heard anything is because PR is on vacay and told the dev team to be on radio silence, while the devs are chained to their desk only allowed to leave for break and figuring out where they can get something delivered from.
When I load a save I have dialogue from subtitles stuck at the bottom of my screen. Even if I turn off subtitles it is still stuck there. If I load an old save it's gone but when I save again and load that NEW save it is back. Anyone have this or know what to try to fix it? Thank you.
That sounds like an issue independent of the save game corruption issue. Have you tried submitting a ticket for this issue or making a new post on the forums?
Out of curiosity, is it the same dialogue that gets stuck at the bottom of your screen, or is it always something different?
is there any confirmation of black screen before loading saves on console ?
I ididn't saw it anywhere on the thread
on Pc it's starting at 5.5 mb, if it's present on console too, you can assume that your save size is above 5.5 if not, you're below and you should be fine
if there's no black screen on console then something is going on too.
the main issue, is the bloating of the saves, we shouldn't be experiencing black screen before loading, if we find a way to reduce the size of the saves then, this issue can be controlled and maybe solved, because I think if we can shrink it back to 4 mb, then the black screen should be gone too
That sounds like an issue independent of the save game corruption issue. Have you tried submitting a ticket for this issue or making a new post on the forums?
Out of curiosity, is it the same dialogue that gets stuck at the bottom of your screen, or is it always something different?
Yes it is the same every time. I'll do a ticket for it now. I did not start a new post seeing as it seemed linked to saving the game but I may do that.
