Underwater Materia Disappearing

[ZXeno84]

Apparently this has been a bug since before the remastered PC version...

I have all but four achievements left. I was going for the Master Overlord achievement. I finally mastered the last materia in the game, only to discover that I did NOT earn the achievement.

I consulted a checklist I found online. I checked off, one-by-one, each mastered materia I had in my inventory, including Master Summon, Master Magic, Master Command, and two complete Enemy Skills. I got to the near the bottom of the list to where "Underwater" was listed. I had already beaten Emerald Weapon, so I had assumed my Underwater materia would be safely tucked away in my inventory. Well when I went to double check, it was gone!

What the heck!

I searched again and again, and could not locate it at all in my inventory.

Upon further online research, I have come to discover that as you master materia and birth more and more new materia, eventually you'll reach the maximum amount of materia you can hold. I learned that I had reached that point when I mastered two insignificant materias (Enemy Lure and Enemy Away) at the same time, but no new materias were birthed. I didn't care about that at the time because I could easily get more at the Gold Saucer.

An hour or so of more grinding went by (after clearing some space by selling Alls to get the money achievement, and by consolidating more materia into the Master Super Materias) when I noticed that I had an extra set of Enemy Lure and Enemy Away. I thought it was weird, but ignored it. It wasn't until another hour or so when I finished my Materia grinding and did my double checks did I realize that my Underwater was gone. It had apparently been deleted by the game to make room for the new materia when I maxed out my inventory.

Fortunately, I have a save file from four and a half hours prior to this soul-crushing point just before I killed Emerald Weapon. I can restart from there and hopefully successfully finish this achievement. But I gotta say that it sure is depressing.

tl;dr: when you get close to maxing out on your materia inventory and are trying to get the Master Overlord achievement (or simply don't want to lose your Underwater Materia), CLEAR SOME SPACE so it doesn't get accidentally overwritten.

[CyberPhoeno]

Huh, so that is what happened to my underwater materia back when I was playing this on the PS1. I even did the quest again to get it just to make sure I didn't miss it, and of course I didn't get another one. Good to know, thanks.

[Kengaboa]

Exactly. Also happened to me when i was playing this on ps1.

[T'aeliskeyr]

Soo.. I've been playing for hours and hours now.. I had already created 2 of each master materias when I found out i had to own all the mastered materias. So I put some more hours in grinding AP to master each materia.. Again.. Now I have each materia mastered but my Underwater materia has dissapeared too. Is there any way to get it back? Even by cheating? I had already overwritten every save file where I still had Underwater so that's no option for me...

[ZXeno84]

I don't think there's a way. I had to restart from a previous save, which resulted in about 2-3 hours of lost AP grinding.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Yeah, it'd be nice if there was a bigger inventory on the PC release. Sorry to hear that, HungShark. Maybe you could use a cheat to get yourself the lost item? If there was ever a time when it would seem reasonable to cheat...

[T'aeliskeyr]

Damn.. so I'll have to start over again.. I cant stand my 97% complete game:P.. but it will take a lot of time to get all materia collected and mastered again..

[plzhavmercy]

There's a program called Jenova you can download. You can add the materia to your game.
http://www.cavesofnarshe.com/ff7/downloads/editors.php

Just be careful because if you move/modify any save files then run the game, the save file is auto erased from your "user_#######" folder. So keep a spare copy of all save files somewhere else, run the game from steam, then while you're still at the menu with cloud holding the buster sword find your spare save file and copy-paste it into the "user_#########" folder. This tedious process is hard to explain, and kind of requires first hand experience.

Once you download the Jenova program, you can change basically everything about your saves. All I did was insert 1 underwater materia into my materia inventory.

[Jaccob]

You can also use the Black Chocobo editor. The latest version also modifies the .xml file so your saves will not get deleted.

[Body Hauler]

I was grinding away for the money achievement and realized I too have birthed to many materia and lost my Underwater. Decided to take on Emerald weapon anyway and beat him with 5 mins to spare, but I hate to think of all the grinding I'm going to have to do in the next play through.

[Pafti]

Well, that's 156 minutes I just wasted grinding AP.
Curious that it would be specifically Underwater that gets deleted, I would have assumed it just takes whatever is in the last spot. Or that it's smart and just prevents the Materia from leveling up leaving it at needing 1 AP to level up until you make enough room for it.

Edit: Second run done, even shaved off ~30 minutes. That somewhat lessens the blow.

[Xengre]

Originally posted by Pafti:

Well, that's 156 minutes I just wasted grinding AP.
Curious that it would be specifically Underwater that gets deleted, I would have assumed it just takes whatever is in the last spot. Or that it's smart and just prevents the Materia from leveling up leaving it at needing 1 AP to level up until you make enough room for it.

Edit: Second run done, even shaved off ~30 minutes. That somewhat lessens the blow.

Perhaps Underwater Materia is at the end or start of the list in code, not the inventory itself, and thus knocked off first. I'm guessing this bug occurs before you hit the actual cap where every slot is holding a materia and scrolling results in no clear space exclusive to the PC version? I know you guys aren't filling up every slot with materia hitting the hard cap because that is a TON of materia (you could create like 6-7 full sets of every single materia mastered in the game doing this getting the achieve 6+x over). There is definitely enough actual space so it must be a bug resulting in an invisible cap in some cases (unless the PC version drastically decreased materia inventory size? I very highly doubt this tho).

[Pafti]

Originally posted by Xengre:

Originally posted by Pafti:

Well, that's 156 minutes I just wasted grinding AP.
Curious that it would be specifically Underwater that gets deleted, I would have assumed it just takes whatever is in the last spot. Or that it's smart and just prevents the Materia from leveling up leaving it at needing 1 AP to level up until you make enough room for it.

Edit: Second run done, even shaved off ~30 minutes. That somewhat lessens the blow.

Perhaps Underwater Materia is at the end or start of the list in code, not the inventory itself, and thus knocked off first. I'm guessing this bug occurs before you hit the actual cap where every slot is holding a materia and scrolling results in no clear space exclusive to the PC version? I know you guys aren't filling up every slot with materia hitting the hard cap because that is a TON of materia (you could create like 6-7 full sets of every single materia mastered in the game doing this getting the achieve 6+x over). There is definitely enough actual space so it must be a bug resulting in an invisible cap in some cases (unless the PC version drastically decreased materia inventory size? I very highly doubt this tho).

There are 83 types of Materia, of which 79 get Maxed for the Achievement, creating another copy of each. That's 162 of a possible 200 slots(excluding equipped Materia) for 2 sets, and that's ignoring all the duplicates you'll collect through normal gameplay. We're hitting the limit because we're also grinding out dozens of All Materia for the Gil achievement, I think I ended up maxing out close to 50 of those. Hitting the limit is not that unlikely.

[Xengre]

Originally posted by Pafti:

Originally posted by Xengre:

Perhaps Underwater Materia is at the end or start of the list in code, not the inventory itself, and thus knocked off first. I'm guessing this bug occurs before you hit the actual cap where every slot is holding a materia and scrolling results in no clear space exclusive to the PC version? I know you guys aren't filling up every slot with materia hitting the hard cap because that is a TON of materia (you could create like 6-7 full sets of every single materia mastered in the game doing this getting the achieve 6+x over). There is definitely enough actual space so it must be a bug resulting in an invisible cap in some cases (unless the PC version drastically decreased materia inventory size? I very highly doubt this tho).

There are 83 types of Materia, of which 79 get Maxed for the Achievement, creating another copy of each. That's 162 of a possible 200 slots(excluding equipped Materia) for 2 sets, and that's ignoring all the duplicates you'll collect through normal gameplay. We're hitting the limit because we're also grinding out dozens of All Materia for the Gil achievement, I think I ended up maxing out close to 50 of those. Hitting the limit is not that unlikely.

Indeed, seems I must have used my other chars as materia banks and forgotten. People grinding out 72 or w/e All Materia and not selling before working on the Master All Materia achievement... I can't even since this should be common sense to make space but even worse is if they don't realize and master the wrong materia at max capacity they have to revert their save and undo all progress or give up on the achievement for the rest of the game (Contain, etc.). Ouch. Hitting the limit going for just one of either of those achievements is exceedingly unlikely, when using common sense, as both cases don't have you going past even 50% the capacity, but since you mention the All Grinding for Gil achievement I guess there really are some people who don't take such things into account until it's to late. It would have been nice if the one time only materia were shuffled into chocobo racing/betting rewards to account for people who make this mistake and lose any chance at the achievement on the PC version.

[Soapy Papoose]

You could also use Black Chocobo to save edit and place the materia back. You had it in the first place so it isn't cheating. I personally would not dedicate 4+ hours again because of a programming error, though I understand the purist perspective.

[Pafti]

Originally posted by Xengre:

Originally posted by Pafti:

There are 83 types of Materia, of which 79 get Maxed for the Achievement, creating another copy of each. That's 162 of a possible 200 slots(excluding equipped Materia) for 2 sets, and that's ignoring all the duplicates you'll collect through normal gameplay. We're hitting the limit because we're also grinding out dozens of All Materia for the Gil achievement, I think I ended up maxing out close to 50 of those. Hitting the limit is not that unlikely.

Indeed, seems I must have used my other chars as materia banks and forgotten. People grinding out 72 or w/e All Materia and not selling before working on the Master All Materia achievement... I can't even since this should be common sense to make space but even worse is if they don't realize and master the wrong materia at max capacity they have to revert their save and undo all progress or give up on the achievement for the rest of the game (Contain, etc.). Ouch. Hitting the limit going for just one of either of those achievements is exceedingly unlikely, when using common sense, as both cases don't have you going past even 50% the capacity, but since you mention the All Grinding for Gil achievement I guess there really are some people who don't take such things into account until it's to late. It would have been nice if the one time only materia were shuffled into chocobo racing/betting rewards to account for people who make this mistake and lose any chance at the achievement on the PC version.

The common sense thing to do is to grind for both achievements at the same time, leaving to sell Materia before you have both the Materia achievement, and enough maxed Materia for the Gil achievement would be a huge waste of time. The common sense thing to expect is that when you hit the cap, at worst you'll not gain any new Materia until you realize you're capped out, which would be immediately as you try to exchange a newly maxed materia for another.
You saying we can hold 6-7 full sets of Materia, when it's really not even 4, should make it pretty clear that one wouldn't generally expect to even hit the cap, especially after two hours of mindless farming. Hitting the cap wouldn't even be a problem if it didn't mean that unrelated, unique materia gets overwritten as a result.

Player foresight can avoid the problem, but the problem existing the first place is ridiculous. Suggesting it's the players fault to encounter this bug is crazy.