A whole lot of yellow "Referenced but not deep saved" errors

[Riven Caith]

So I'll start a new game because of some instabilities in my last run. But before I commit myself to that I want to ask about something else that bugs me for a long time.

I think many people here know about that error message. It doesn't seem to cause much of a problem but it makes me nervous nonetheless. Since I deleted my old safe and haven't started a new one I can't exactly quote it here but it's a yellow error message that SEEMS to pop up every time the game saves (manual or auto save) and states something about a pawn or shuttle that is being referenced but is not deep saved, which would cause errors during loading.

Once you load the game all of those messages seem to pop up one last time. Saving after that will not cause those errors anymore. At least until new ones are being generated after a few minutes or hours.

What exactly do these messages do? They don't seem to be harmful (at least not that I know directly of) but they just won't go away. And since I don't know how to replicate them It's really difficult for me to find out which mods potentially create them.

So what do they do? What kind of mod is likely to create them? Anyone here with that juicy, juicy inside knowledge? Would be much appreciated! : )

[Astasia]

Yellow text in the log generally means you can ignore it, they are debug warnings but aren't usually relevant to players. I'm fairly certain in this case those warnings can be caused by the base game garbage collection system, it can be something like a raider hitting a colonist with a gun shot then leaving the map, the game deletes that raider from the world pawn list but the reference to them hitting your colonist still exists, this creates a warning for the duration that combat reference still exists but it eventually fades. Similar with art on equipment or buildings that references deleted world pawns. Those specific examples may not be capable of causing the error currently, I'm not sure, over the years the warning has popped up in various situations and the devs occasionally fix them. I'm pretty sure there are still some vanilla situations that can cause them but I don't know which offhand.

Mods like Runtime GC can cause them to happen a lot more often if it's deleting world pawns more aggressively, likewise mods that have their own cleanup systems for their various functions can leave behind references occasionally.

I have always ignored such warnings and I don't think it will ever cause any real problems.