How save system works?

[Jethro]

Had the pleasure of my power going out last night, mid-game. This resulted in my save file being corrupted and wasn’t in my “load” list. My buddy looked it up and walked me through; basically creating a new save but importing a few files into the new save. This brought back our entire world and inventory, skills etc but it reverted us back to Day 1.

Can anyone help me understand how or why this works the way it does? The save data was obviously still intact. But the game decided to not give me the option to load that save.

I guess we got lucky and I was able to restore our world. Only thing I had to do was set our day back to 73.

[Shurenai]

You didn't really have to set the day back to 73, tbh. The total day count doesn't really matter anymore beyond letting you know how long the save has existed... The day number has no impact on any ingame systems.


That said, The game basically is always writing to the save file- Constantly updating whatever files need to be updated because the save is so large that to do it in one lump sum would basically necessitate forcing the player to stop playing for 15-30+ seconds every time it saves.

Certain files- Like the one you replaced- are written to CONSTANTLY, so when you suddenly shut power off, or in your case, have your power go out, it gets corrupted. It's almost a definite thing for the specific file replaced to get corrupted; Other files are probably fine because even if they corrupt, as long as the main file is in-tact it can sortof work backwards and restore things.


To note, This isn't just something that happens to this game- It happens to every game, every operating system, every program. If you cut power mid-write of a file, that file is partially old file partially new file with no particular rhyme or reason- Totally corrupted.

This is why most games in the last several decades warn you "Do not turn off the power or unplug the console while this autosave symbol is on screen". If you do remove the power, it corrupts the save.


Now, where most other games 'win out' versus this game is in save file size and ability to have backups. 7DTD saves are pretty large; Even a brand new save is 200+mb, while longer term saves can be upwards of 1gb+.

Meanwhile the largest save for most other games maxes out at 25-50mb, and often are measured in 1-5mb, or even in sub 1000kb. Those games can have 2-3 backups of a save entry without taking a large amount of disk space.

Edit: Forgot to add, Gamers don't really notice if 25mb is dedicated to having 4 backups of their 5mb save; they DO notice when multiple gigs are sucked up with no warning. This is doubly so since the saves are located on the OS drive, which many people keep dedicated to their OS- And as such, at a much reduced drive space where every gig is precious.


And as previously mentioned, this game saves constantly- So it's always writing to the same slot, where most other games have 3 autosave slots that the game switches between, since they save in lumps due to their small save sizes.

[Moriannae]

I'm sorry to respond to a fairly old post, but I haven't found any other helpful one, so here's to hoping someone knowledgeable will respond to me here. I've had a fairly fresh game. Done some stuff, set up a base, a combat base as well, died on horde night cos I wasn't well prepared, no biggie. After that I went to complete some trader quest I've had backed up and to pick up stuff I've left in a building somewhere, then gone back to my base. I've gotten all the way back into my base, with all the loot and whatnot, quest finished but it was night, so I've just set up crafting, gone through my supplies and once all that was done, I've gone out of the game - just a normal back to main menu, then turn off the game.
Well I've turned it on today and... To my surprise I'm outside of my base, I see that my quest is incomplete, looking through my inventory I see that I haven't got *anything* that I've collected past the horde night yesterday, I have one less lvl than I've had and the game tells me "you've died recently, would be great if you haven't done that again for a while". All the while the day and the time is correct, in a sense that it's the same day and time when I've closed the game, but the rest just... Rolled back? Anyone had that happening? Or any idea why it's happened? It's a bit discouraging honestly