I tried loading a character I'd been playing for a while... and to my delight the game crashed and I got a steam achievement! It became progressively less delightful when the game kept crashing on every subsequent attempt to load my character and I received no more achievements. I'd saved and loaded that character multiple times before without issue, and afterwards I created a new character and that one can save and load without issue. I'm running Windows 7, playing version 1.0.3 of the game through Steam. Any ideas on whats happening and how I can get my character back so I can die and lose him the right way?
Did you alter any of the game files in any way (modding, item editor, etc.) or perhaps accidentally duplicate an item? Any time you alter the game files, any previous save no longer functions until those files are restored to the state they were when the game was saved. If you duplicate items, whenever you remove the duplicate from the game (either by selling it or by sending it to a Museum) the save file has a high chance to corrupt (also, the game usually crashes at this point, too). If you had an auto-save (which is unlikely now since you started a new character) you could try loading that up and losing only a little of your time, by comparison.
Hmm.. I don't have any mods/ item editors, and if I duplicated an item (how?) then I didn't notice. I was playing as a summoner and somehow instead of replacing my old robot summons I managed to create a few of them. Then I went down a level and summoned one of the mustache things. Could the multiple summons have done it? The game didn't crash, I had saved and quit. I'm pretty sure I'd saved and quit then loaded back up before with multiple summons. The auto save was still there for old game at a point before I went down stairs and was surrounded by two summoned robots that love. I found this arousing, but when I renamed the auto save to the name of the real save (this is how you're supposed to do it, right?) it still crashed when I tried loading.
No, you were just supposed to load the auto-save from the Load Game menu. >~>; The item-duplication crash appears to be an anti-cheat mechanic in the game. Nothing to worry about if you don't know about it. The multiple summons is a bug, but I haven't seen it corrupt a save (and I have a save with 30+ summons surrounding me, so I've tried to make it corrupt or crash). There exists a possibility that you save has just corrupted itself without any player input. Since the game still has unresolved issues, sometimes things like that happen. (I've had a game crash one-and-a-half hours into a floor as I was fighting off a Monster Zoo. ;~; )
I changed the names back, but how do I load the auto-save? The load games menu only shows my actual games. I see the patch says it's only accessible in crash recovery mode, but I can't see where that's set up. So I might lose saved characters to corruption at any point "just because"? Granted, I was playing with permadeath anyway, but that's rough. Was several hours into the corrupted character. A "what not to do" list would be really useful. Thanks for help.
To reiterate: Losing characters is -extremely rare.- The game crashing is (a little) more common, but you aren't likely to lost the character unless you had never saved prior (even a save and quit will work on Perma-Death if you're afraid of crashes). I have had one legitimate crash (as a result of limited memory, so partially my fault). All of my corrupted game files have been -my own fault- so far. I'm just saying it isn't outside of the realm of possibility to have a corrupted game file occur (especially if you're going in and trying to rename save files; it took me forever to locate these). Hell, I've had random and game-breaking glitches in other commercially backed games before. In closing, a lesson I've learned from a lifetime of gaming: Save often, save well.
"Any time you alter the game files, any previous save no longer functions until those files are restored to the state they were when the game was saved." This is actually incorrect at least, from my experience. I've edited TweakDB.xml several times, and the the games made before it was altered loaded for me. Maybe I'm just lucky.
Created a new character and now I see the auto save for the new character listed as a loadable option whenever I load the game. Odd, the whole time I was playing the file that eventually got corrupted I never saw autosave displayed.
