Starfield savegames bloated

[blackmorebard]

Hi I posted already but I think something went wrong so sorry if doubleposting. My savegames seem to get bloated. I play on Geforce now, I have three mods: Deimog, At hell's gate, Escape. Everything was ok until the game told me that my disk space is running low. I had about 26 saves so I simply deleted the old ones. Now I got the same message, have 16 savegames AND the savegame load times has increased DRASTICALLY. Any idea what to do about it?

[kdodds]

Make sure you're not using OneDrive for your saves.

[wyodinosaur]

Are you by chance using cloud saving? That might be the culprit.

And this game does bloat saves after a while of playing. And the load time does increase as it does so. I have saves from one of my playthroughs that are over 100Mb. And those saves do take longer to load than smaller ones.

[blackmorebard]

1. I'm not using cloud saving on Steam.
2. However, I'm using Geforce Now. It stores my savegames on their servers and somehow synchs them with steam, but that's all.

If that doesn't change that means I won't be able to survey all planets, because that will bloat the savegames even further. :/

[kdodds]

It sounds more like an issue with space available and not bloat. What are you save file sizes?

[blackmorebard]

Cannot say unfortunately, as Geforce Now stores the saves, HOWEVER, i can say that I have 50GB free disk space for my instance of Starfield on Geforce Now. I have 16 saves and loading takes around 90 seconds.

[kdodds]

Originally posted by blackmorebard:

Cannot say unfortunately, as Geforce Now stores the saves, HOWEVER, i can say that I have 50GB free disk space for my instance of Starfield on Geforce Now. I have 16 saves and loading takes around 90 seconds.

Definitely not save bloat. I've never seen a BGS save bloat to 1GB, much less 50GB. Sounds like it might be a connectivity issue then. You can't manage your saves on their site?

[Bnn1]

Bloating hasn't been an issue in the game for a long time due to the cleanup improvements Bethesda rolled out several updates ago.

I have finished the Varuun Storyline 2 days ago.

My savegames that i made are of those file sizes:

1. 866 KB
2. 2,35 MB
3. 1,90 MB
4. 6,32 MB
5. 4,23 MB
6. 4,83 MB
7. 5,41 MB
8. 5,82 MB

Notice the fluctuations between 4th and the rest, as well as 2nd and 3rd savegame - the game does clean itself up properly. This is without any mods.

My guess is the mods are the culprit for the loading, but my loading also is relatively slow.

But the savegame sizes being multiple gigabytes in size would be greatly concerning, if they cause the computer to run low on memory.

[sarcastic_godot]

Point is that eventually there are so many dropped items to keep track of that your savefiles will balloon.

On a random PoI this eventually gets purged / (partially)reset, but not so on your outposts. So the more clutter you leave in your wake - especially in your outposts - the larger the files will get. Only once you use the Unity will the file get cleaned out...

So, 90sec is horribly long, and you really should be moving your savefiles to a local, in-machine (!) SSD. This will only ever get worse...

To give you a filesize: I ran way past the Lvl-200 mark during my first round. Savefiles grew to north of 115 Megabytes. Bloated? No. Just a lot of stuff to keep track of - outposts, all that gear, all the landing points on those hundreds of planets I surveyed, yadda yadda,...

[dbean199]

This game seems to have bloat files anyway. I'm on PC. Until this past week I used pc xbox app to play on my pc. To get to game saves, had to show hidden files, then go to appdata/packages/bethesda. What I seen in the wgs file which is saved games, were 1 or 2 with an actual saved game. however, there were still loads of save game files that were empty. Once I decided to delete these empty files and that screwed everything up. My guess is the game is not set up to properly delete empty folders and still thinks they are relevant.

[kdodds]

Originally posted by dbean199:

This game seems to have bloat files anyway. I'm on PC. Until this past week I used pc xbox app to play on my pc. To get to game saves, had to show hidden files, then go to appdata/packages/bethesda. What I seen in the wgs file which is saved games, were 1 or 2 with an actual saved game. however, there were still loads of save game files that were empty. Once I decided to delete these empty files and that screwed everything up. My guess is the game is not set up to properly delete empty folders and still thinks they are relevant.

Some programming may use the EXISTENCE of an entity as a flag in and of itself. This is precisely why you should not delete anything unless you know why it's there. ;) Also, I've no idea what you're referencing, but it doesn't sound like a save folder, unless maybe you have mods that are creating extra data there.

[blackmorebard]

Originally posted by 76561197996652358:

Point is that eventually there are so many dropped items to keep track of that your savefiles will balloon.

On a random PoI this eventually gets purged / (partially)reset, but not so on your outposts. So the more clutter you leave in your wake - especially in your outposts - the larger the files will get. Only once you use the Unity will the file get cleaned out...

So, 90sec is horribly long, and you really should be moving your savefiles to a local, in-machine (!) SSD. This will only ever get worse...

To give you a filesize: I ran way past the Lvl-200 mark during my first round. Savefiles grew to north of 115 Megabytes. Bloated? No. Just a lot of stuff to keep track of - outposts, all that gear, all the landing points on those hundreds of planets I surveyed, yadda yadda,...

I was also afraid of that, I'm trying to explore as many planets as possible, and I have many landing locations, that may probably make it worse. I'm not an expert but I'll try to sync the saves with steam, and then make a fresh steam based save, then try again, (maybe the geforce now service does something weird).

[blackmorebard]

Ok so here's something interesting I decided to check out how the savegames perform on regular Steam without using the Geforce Now service. Steam didn't have the savegames at all so I enabled Cloud Sync to synchronize the saves. What happened? I ended up with more than 70 (SIC!) savegames (starting with level 1). It seems that Geforce Now doesn't erase the savegames properly somehow. Unfortunately I cannot explore it tech-wise because I'm not all that familiar with the platform, but I will experiment with the savegames (e.g. clean out the original steam ones, going down from 70 to 5, load the latest, save on steam, then sync with GN). I will let you know what's going on.

UPDATE: OK SO - I managed to get rid of the ridiculous number of saves and resync with Geforce now, but unfortunately it changed nothing. The only thing that comes to my mind is - is there a way to somehow reset the landing zones that have no important purpose? I don't even have an outpost yet and I sell most of the clutter, but I visited a crazy amount of places. :/