[2023] Done with this game!

Well, of course you can walk away from the game, and if you're that upset with it (and I can understand why you would be) a break may from it be the best thing for you.

In case you want to know why it happened, it's because the way 7dtd saves the game is continuous, small reads and write to the game file. It does this, because the save file can get so huge (over 1gb+) for longer games, that to save it all at once, would lock up the client for a good few minutes while the write took place.

To avoid this very unwanted situation, it's a large series of very small read and writes. The problem with that though is if the game is catastrophically shut, a power outage being the very worst that can happen. The game file is open, the file may even be in the middle of being written to when the power is lost, and subsequent corruption of the file is highly likely.

It sux when it happens, but there's not much that can be done about that, given the way the saves happen.

As for your lost gear and level, there's ways to quickly get all that back via the console, and if you're interested in doing that, turn cheat mode on, and use the item menu (should be U) to give yourself all the gear you lost. You could also then edit the progression.xml file to give yourself a huge amount of skill points per level to recover very quickly the lost skill points (like, literally you could give yourself 100 skill points just for going up 1 level).

Originally posted by ZombieMaster: thanks for the explanation. In my rage i deleted the game but since it backed up my save game in a folder i still have i will go back to it eventually

No worries. I can understand the rage. As it happens, I have a UPS on my machine (and the screen as well), so in the event of a power outage I've still got a good 15 minutes to do a graceful shutdown of the game.

It's an option as well if you were really keen.

You can use the command: giveself xp 10000 in the console (F1) to get back to your level if this happens again. You can increase or decrease the number and repeat the command until you get back to where you were.

You can also type cm into the console and then click on the light bulb icon on the right side of the user interface and gain back the most important items you lost.

On the upside, you are going to have to start over anyway once A21 releases so treat this first game as your intro, play other stuff until A21 hits and then start over again and keep those commands in mind just in case. :)

Originally posted by Mithrandir:

Originally posted by OzHawkeye:
No worries. I can understand the rage. As it happens, I have a UPS on my machine (and the screen as well), so in the event of a power outage I've still got a good 15 minutes to do a graceful shutdown of the game.

It's an option as well if you were really keen.

I understand their save strategy must be little by little and that power outage can then hurt.

Considering that vulnerability, I wonder if they could eventually add a periodic backup system of our save to allow for a rollback if the current save is corrupted ? If not while playing, maybe when we correctly leave the game (then a rollback would lose only one play session) instead of the entire game.

The problem with that strategy is basically the same as performing a manual save - it has to write the entire file - and I've heard of some really long A20 games having save files up to 10gigs in size (keep in mind the save file has to include the full state of every single voxel that players have manipulated in even the slightest way in a map that's made up of fully destructable voxels top to bottom).

To give you an idea of how long that could take, simply time how long it takes you to get into the game and be able to move around once you click on the button in the menu to specify which save to load. Whatever that time is, is going to be about the same time it'll take to save the game file (roughly), and the time during which your client has slowed either to a crawl or completely stopped while the save is in progress.

Originally posted by Tahnval:

Originally posted by Mithrandir: I understand their save strategy must be little by little and that power outage can then hurt.

Considering that vulnerability, I wonder if they could eventually add a periodic backup system of our save to allow for a rollback if the current save is corrupted ? If not while playing, maybe when we correctly leave the game (then a rollback would lose only one play session) instead of the entire game.

I run the game through the 7DTD modlauncher and it does a save backup every time. Before loading a game rather than after leaving the game, but the effect is the same. It's a noticeable delay due to the amount of data, but I think it's worth it. Besides, I go back to the days when it took 4 or 5 minutes to load a ~40KB (no typo, that's kilobytes) game from tape so I probably have a little more tolerance for longer load times than most people :)

I wouldn't want it during the game, but I think that before or after is a reasonable compromise.

A player could make a batch file to backup the save whenever they want outside of the game (which is what I did before using the modlauncher) or do it manually within file explorer. It'll take the same amount of time to do the backup, though.

I also regularly back up my save game file, and the game itself of course performs a full save when you exit the game. I would expect most players would not want such a save to occur while they're playing the game though.

But yes, regular backups should happen if you really want to protect your progress.

https://www.easeus.com/computer-instruction/7-days-to-die-corrupted-save-pc.html

This can help as well.