Ya know what makes grinding the weapon orbs to 9 terrible?

[Toucan Safari]

The magic rope doesn't get you out of the fortress. It always feels like a race to the exit when an orb finally drops cause you never know when a crash is going to occur.

I've lost 1 glove orb, 1 axe orb and 1 javelin orb to the fortress crashes so far.

[the Winter Warlock]

That's what the third slot is for. If you game crashes, you shoul load the bottom slot; that's your autosave.

[Toucan Safari]

It took me a while to realize that. Most of the time when I crash I just move on to another game and when I come back I had forgotten that it was a crash that kicked me off.

Generally the game hasn't crashed much at all (maybe 3 tops until I got to the Mana palace) but once I got the Fortress it got real bad.

[the Winter Warlock]

Well don't feel so bad. I missed a couple of monsters that I can't do anymore to complete the guide, so I would have to play the game again from the beginning.

[keeperofcastlegreydusk]

Just had another crash in the Fortress myself, though so far the autosave hasn't corrupted. So anything good I pick up gets saved there. It's an annoying issue to be sure, but on the bright side, it doesn't seem to be game-ruining.

According to another Post on this board, there is a patch coming for all versions (yes, the console versions have the same issues too, apparently) very soon.

Here's the page that announces this patch: https://gematsu.com/2018/02/secret-mana-version-1-02-update-launches-early-march-ps4-soon-ps-vita-pc

Hopefully, that reduces the sting of having your game be force-stopped by Windows or whatever OS you're using. :(

[Toucan Safari]

The auto-save has done a lot of work to save my grinding in that fortress. On the brightside it's looking like I'll have all the achievements done in one go once I park at an inn to grind up magic levels.

I feel part of the problem with all the crashing in Fortress is all the loading screens, I don't remember nearly this many back in the day. I think the likeliest candidate for these crashes is the game is improperly storing enemy health values and not checking enemy state when a number gets changed.

Example: an enemy casts a life drain attack but dies before the health is given to them. I'm thinking the game empties the data container and unassigns the bits on enemy death but the spell is still queued to change the data value of that location on completion. Loading screens would likely still have the same issue as it has to unload the old enemies and load new enemies so if you transition while an enemy's data is being altered it'll also go boom.

That's my theory since the crashes only really started once I was fighting enemies with life drain but I had extremely rare crashes during loading screens when the AI killed something as the screen faded.

[Claneko]

Kind of reminds me of a story from the original version. I was over at a relative's house way back in the day, playing the SNES version, and I was working on getting the level 9 orbs. Well while I was deep in the fortress, and moving back and forth between areas to respawn enemies and getting all kinds of good stuff (armor and sometimes an orb), a thunderstorm had started to roll in. This was a problem, because it always seemed like the power at the house would always flicker at least once or twice during these situations.

I had been in the fortress for a couple of hours, was like at the last portion before Thanatos, and I swear I was sweating the potential consequences as I hauled my ass out of that place, to Flammie, and to the nearest town to save. All was well and I don't think I've sighed with so much relief since then, lmao.

The fear of a random crash though? I can only imagine. I want to play this, but I'm sort of waiting out a patch or so before I go into it, but I kinda of (admittedly not exactly) know the feeling of farming in the fortress and not wanting to lose all the time you spent.

[Toucan Safari]

As pointed out by one of the earlier gents, the auto save feature is always on and it saves during each loading screen so you'll begin at the last door you walked through.

As I mentioned in my post there are a TON of loading screens/rooms in the Fortress so the auto save will prevent you from losing more than 3-6 minutes of effort (if you remember to load it, oops).

[the Winter Warlock]

Originally posted by Claneko:

Kind of reminds me of a story from the original version. I was over at a relative's house way back in the day, playing the SNES version, and I was working on getting the level 9 orbs. Well while I was deep in the fortress, and moving back and forth between areas to respawn enemies and getting all kinds of good stuff (armor and sometimes an orb), a thunderstorm had started to roll in. This was a problem, because it always seemed like the power at the house would always flicker at least once or twice during these situations.

I had been in the fortress for a couple of hours, was like at the last portion before Thanatos, and I swear I was sweating the potential consequences as I hauled my ass out of that place, to Flammie, and to the nearest town to save. All was well and I don't think I've sighed with so much relief since then, lmao.

The fear of a random crash though? I can only imagine. I want to play this, but I'm sort of waiting out a patch or so before I go into it, but I kinda of (admittedly not exactly) know the feeling of farming in the fortress and not wanting to lose all the time you spent.

There is an autosave function.

[keeperofcastlegreydusk]

Originally posted by DuckShield:

The auto-save has done a lot of work to save my grinding in that fortress. On the brightside it's looking like I'll have all the achievements done in one go once I park at an inn to grind up magic levels.

I feel part of the problem with all the crashing in Fortress is all the loading screens, I don't remember nearly this many back in the day. I think the likeliest candidate for these crashes is the game is improperly storing enemy health values and not checking enemy state when a number gets changed.

Example: an enemy casts a life drain attack but dies before the health is given to them. I'm thinking the game empties the data container and unassigns the bits on enemy death but the spell is still queued to change the data value of that location on completion. Loading screens would likely still have the same issue as it has to unload the old enemies and load new enemies so if you transition while an enemy's data is being altered it'll also go boom.

That's my theory since the crashes only really started once I was fighting enemies with life drain but I had extremely rare crashes during loading screens when the AI killed something as the screen faded.

Most of my crashes happened shortly after an area-transition, which as you know is what triggers the loading screen and a feature that distinguishes the Remake from the Original. The auto-save. It is possible that the crashes happening after a transition the majority of the time is just a big coincidence, but I am probably not the guy who can say for sure.

In the Bug Collection Thread, I believe someone mentioned the possibility of a "pointer error" being the cause of the crashes, rather than a "memory-leak" as suggested in another thread. I didn't get around to researching those two terms today, unfortunately. However, in connection with what you said about an Energy Absorb-using monster getting killed before recovering HP from the spell, I can say that in the original, recovering HP ALWAYS took priority over taking damage, at least with your characters. Can't recall off-hand if it did with the monsters right now.

I think the Remake possibly reverses this, so HP recovered from item use/Cure Water/Moon Saber/Energy Absorb won't save you or a monster if the game engine detects a fatal hit on you/the monster, as the case may be.

I am not the most tech-savvy guy in the world. But based on this new behaviour, I'd say your theory would be worth looking into further, if you are so inclined.

Sorry I took so long to reply to you, and thanks for your response. :)