So I just had the game crash after picking the “none” option in the list of skills to train when turning in a completed quest. Apparently the autosave feature I remember this game having isn’t turned on by default, which I discovered after losing five hours of progress, setting me back to juuust before I’d begun construction on what ended up being the most badass vehicle I’ve ever built, which is now gone. And three of those hours were the boring but necessary inventory management stuff.
Jokes on me, I guess. It might be a while before I can bring myself to play Cataclysm again. Not you guys’ fault, but I needed to vent.
In defense of the default, I have personally lost far more games due to autosave being ON. Just when you get in a shitty situation, and… autosave! My last 2-season character tried to take on Amigara Horrors but the second wave was buggy. Locked the terminal up. Force quit, reloaded, and guess where autosave autosaved? Right before wave 2. Same bug happened over and over again. Game over.
Bummer that you lost your progress but why would you play ANY game (or do anything on a computer) without saving periodically?
Granted, this game doesn’t make it easy since autosave isn’t on by default and quicksave isn’t mapped by default but this game is kind of hardcore and it’s probably not expecting much for one to be responsible for oneself. Worst case just save/quit and reload periodically - doesn’t take that long and isn’t that disruptive (vs losing hours).
I have the “ignore enemy” for safe mode remapped to ‘q’ since having it on apostrophe was going to drive me utterly insane (which safe mode does anyways but every time I run without it for too long I seem to find a hulk and get destroyed). I then have quick save mapped to apostrophe so I can save at will - which was how I was rolling (with no autosave) until…
I had the same thing happen - game crash after backing out of the NPC training dialog. I only lost about 30 mins since I sometimes remember to quick save here and there.
The last week or so of experimental seem insanely crash prone in general, or maybe it’s just that I started enabling NPCs and never did before - whatever it is, the game is crashing regularly. I just disabled NPCs in my current game but I’m still getting crashes. The NPCs also seem to cause the game to hitch and/or go unresponsive regularly too. I’m done with NPCs if they’re the cause of the instability and crashes, that’s for sure.
I was able to run without autosave on for days/weeks without issue til this - now it’s back on again.
Side note: I’m not sure how autosave works but it seems to save too often when it’s on - or I guess it could be my imagination. The turns/timer should reset if either the specified turns for save are met or the specified time limit, but it seems like it saves for both instead of smartly between them (or I could be wrong…). I end up setting higher frequencies to try to get less frequent autosaves. It would also be nice if the game halted you safe mode style or gave some warning before the save occurred, since saving takes a few moments (even on SSD) and you might key spam and get yourself killed not realizing the save is happening (since the msg for saving happens after the save is done).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m normally a compulsive quicksaver in games like Skyrim. But discounting the autosave, which I falsely assumed was enabled, why would I manually save and quit the game during play? I don’t save-scum, and it autosaves every 50 turns by default. I do back up my save file at the end of a given session, which is why I lost five hours of progress instead of nine. Now that I have autosave enabled, I haven’t had any problems, and my new campaign is going quite well (managed to get a Broken Cyborg out of the Sealed Lab start, grind all bionics-related skills up to 8, and remove all negative bionics, which I’ve never managed before). I suspect turning down random NPC spawns by a factor of 10 has helped a lot with game stability as well. So it all worked out either way
I’ve been playing this game on-and-off for, oh, around six years now? I can’t stay mad at it for long
