@Azulath @FlorettaV I've skimmed about halfway through this thread and have yet to see any mentions of the fact that the save files are compressed so I'll outline my findings here.
They've got a short fixed header, a list of chunk extents, and then LZ4-compressed chunks each representing 256 KiB of decompressed data.
Direct measurements of file size are unfortunately not indicative of how the actual decompressed save may change in size, as small variations in game state may affect the compression ratio. You would have to sum up the decompressed size of the chunks to determine how large the decompressed payload actually is.
For example, I looked at the uploaded saves of
@Duskguy and
@EnnyRose earlier in this thread:
EnnyRose's file is just shy of 8 MiB and contains 32298362 bytes (30.8 MiB) of payload across 124 chunks.
Duskguy's file is truncated at 8 MiB and should contain 46313601 bytes (44.2 MiB) of payload across 177 chunks of which only 61 are intact. Those 61 chunks represent just 16252928 bytes (15.5 MiB) of payload.
While EnnyRose gets a nice 4:1 compression ratio, Duskguy has just around 2:1. Something about their dataset is quite a bit less compressible.
What really baffles me though is that as they're compressed, it's not the size of the actual save that is necessarily limiting here, but the size of its compressed representation.