Taking a Quadrillion Years to Save

[Jesus_Smith_Nandez]

Title. My game takes the entire Cretatious period to save. I have ended up being forced to quit during saving and this causes save corruption, loss of items without location and vice versa, and basically a lot of weird shit that requires me to use debug and hack my way back to where I was.

This is strange because sometimes is saves in a normal amount of time and sometimes it takes so fucking long I leave my computer on before I go to bed. Loading times are not affected at all.

The game is on a USB, so I imagine that would be the issue here, but either way this is fucking stupid and it should be saving properly without crazy shit like I’m seeing.

Using experimental 3998 (0.C-7973-gb04ed99) right now. It’s been saving for about 15 minutes as of typing this.

[Malkeus]

I keep my game on a USB also, but the only time it’s taken my game longer than a minute to save was when I had just read a road map and traveled a few dozen map tiles between saves. What is happening in your world? Lots of exploring, lots of monsters? If you are using windows, do you have readyboost enabled? More information needed, mon ami.

[Jesus_Smith_Nandez]

I’m on Windows 10 so readyboost isn’t available. I have not explored the map any more than I would deem average. Only been through one Lab and a couple mines. Never found a roadmap. I’m using a rather new (bought earlier this year) hard drive that has not shown any hiccups yet. Processor is a AMD Athlon X4 860k without any overclocking applied. The USB is an old USB 2.0 drive, which is required because the computers at my school are 2.0. I’m not running any simultanious programs other than VLC to play music.

Edit: I also use a few mods that ad items (none of the huge game changing ones, just tweaks) and z-levels. Looking back the z-levels probaby did me in in this case.

[Coolthulhu]

Most USB drives are probably formatted with FAT16/32 filesystems. Those aren’t very efficient at saving tons of files.
The save/load system is rather simple when it comes to file access - it creates a single file for every overmap tile. Z-levels cause the game to generate more files, because some of the levels below are also saved (levels above aren’t, unless they’re something other than pure air).

I don’t really see a good solution here other than copying the game to the hard drive before starting it and then back after saving.
Making the format more USB-friendly would take major restructuring of the save game format.

[ZoneWizard]

Ooorrr, try formatting the memory stick to NTFS. Most will able to do so if made in the past 4-5 years. You can still force a format to another file system, but the device won’t like it and may run slower. -_-