Corrupted saves.

[Flex Offender]

I'm going to explain this as clearly as possible so that someone can potentially help me.

I created a save in the Cheydinhal Fighters Guild building. This ended up crashing my game, but I loaded it back up fine. I slept in a bed to level up. It created an autosave, which then also crashed. Both of these files ended up corrupted. I've tried the trick where you delete the .ess file of the last autosave, which was the corrupted one, and then rename the autosave.bak file to autosave.ess. I know that the autosave.bak file isn't corrupted, so all i need to do is somehow make it so that it loads at that point. Can anyone help me, or do I seriously have to reload the save that is 10 levels lower? I can give more details if needed.

[Comestibles]

here's a tip next time: keep more then 1 save (this applies for literally every game with a save system)

[󰀉tempeh󰀉]

If the .bak isn't corrupt, that should work fine.

In my experience, however, there are also *doomed* saves that aren't corrupt, but any save made afterward will be corrupt and crash. Think of them as asymptomatic corrupt saves. Sometimes the game will crash a minute after you make a doomed save. I lost, I think, 20 hours of progress a couple years back due to doomed saves; luckily I never overwrote saves, or I would have lost 270 hours. (I spend a lot of time just wandering about filling out my map. Don't judge me.)

They mostly seem to arise from some weird quest dialog script wonkiness, and also placing items back into corpses' inventories. NPC combat AI also seems to get messed up sometimes if there's too many combatants, if they get disarmed, or if a cell gets unloaded without combat being resolved. Knights of Order and battles between guards and bandits seem to be the main culprits. I also have to be careful to never sell stolen items to a fence who also owns legal copies of the same thing. It's weird and annoying, but I've developed habits that mostly prevent it from happening anymore. I've managed to find work-arounds for nearly every quest with corrupt dialog (Umbra proved a challenge), but there doesn't seem to be any way to resolve the final Dark Brotherhood quest without a doomed save. I didn't like those guys anyway, though, so they can just stay there waiting for me forever; my passive-aggressive way of destroying them from the inside. (Maybe I can find a mod for a lock spell and lock the doors on them?)

[Flex Offender]

for me it was literally just saving crashed me. I loaded a non corrupt autosave, went to a bed, slept(which generated a new autosave) which then crashed my game. This new autosave and the save were both corrupt, but i dont think the .bak file is corrupted. The corrupted files are a lot smaller, but the .bak file is around 2mb, which is the same size as all the non corrupted files, whereas the corrupted ones are around 250kb

[Flex Offender]

Also dark brotherhood was fine for me, I've finished it twice with no issues. I've also never had dialogue issues, it's always loading screens that screw me over

[The_Renegade09]

What I noticed is that crashes are often preceded by bad performance. Every time the FPS go suddenly down, my game would crash a few minutes later. Saving while having bad FPS would also corrupt my saves and lead to a crash.

tl;dr don't save when it starts to lag. Just quit and restart.

[Aᴘᴘʟᴇᴄᴏʀɴ]

have you changed any of your mod-list btwn saves? even moving up and down load order matters.