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[AlwayzL3git]

I played on a fortress for 7 hours STRAIGHT. It was my second successful fortress EVER... I went to sleep, after saving and exiting. I got on this morning, tried to load it. I waited 15 minutes, until the "DwarfFortress.exe has stopped working..." message. I tried 3 times. Same thing. I hit cancel and close it out. I tried re installing everything, but to no avail. The same thing happened to my first Successful fortress. I can't play without being able to save and load! HELP!

[XXSockXX]

Does that happen to all your saves? Can you start a fort, save immediately and then load it?

You could try to turn "compressed saves" off in the init.txt, that seems to cause save game corruption sometimes.

[AlwayzL3git]

I think it only happens to saves that have a decent impact on the world, and require a bit of memory. I'm not sure about new fortress though. Thanks for the input! I'll see about the new embark, and in 7 hours, I'll see about the compressed save!

[XXSockXX]

If it only happens with saves you played for a longer time, that sounds like the compressed saves issue to me. Happened to me too.

To be sure and to not waste 7h you should test if it does not happen with new saves.

If you like a fort it is also a good idea to make backups of the saves from time to time.

[AlwayzL3git]

If it only happens with saves you played for a longer time, that sounds like the compressed saves issue to me. Happened to me too.

To be sure and to not waste 7h you should test if it does not happen with new saves.

If you like a fort it is also a good idea to make backups of the saves from time to time.

I made a fort, saved game and exited. I loaded it no problem. Compressed saves was on. I guess I'll turn it off, and keep on playing. I'll have to hope for the best...

[Starver]

Seasonal autosaves are something else you might want to turn on (and I make mine do an on-embark, too, but probably wouldn't be necessary for you).  I do this even though I've not had your problem.  Just being OCD. 

Anyway, perhaps with the above set, you would find that the Summer-In-Year-Six save opened, even if the subsequent Autumn and further seasons had not.  But then you've only lost up to a couple of years of game-time play.

Remember that if you load the (I forget exactly how it goes, but something like) "region1-Aut-1073" save and continue with that, then the next autosave will be "region1-Aut-1073-Win-1073" (and the one after that "region1-Aut-1073-Spr 1074") so once you've verified that the game you load is the one you want, rename it back to plain "region1" (if you don't fancy changing it to "FortressName"), after deleting or renaming the existing, corrupt, version.  Otherwise, the file/directory names could get messy.

(Wouldn't hurt the gameplay, at least not until after several such incidents broke the 255-or-whatever character limit, although it might also look messy on the Loading screen...)


(Oh, and several years of seasonal saves might look messy in its own right, in that self-same loading screen.  I also periodically (after exiting the game) go into the loading screen and create a "_region1" directory to shuffle any seasonal saves of more than year old into, to leave just the regular (undated) save for each embark, and up to four historic ones.  I could shuffle them all away, because one can always retrieve from the _region1 folder any "region1-foo-###" folder that I feel the need to test, old or new.  But the point is that moving them another folder-level down means they don't show on the loading screen.  I could just as easily delete them, but I'm OCD about not doing so, and you're better of not doing so for reasons of making sure you have an uncorrupted save you can get back to, even if it's a couple of game-years old.)


Sorry, does any of that make sense?  A simple post expanded, immensely, during writing.  Sorry.

[i2amroy]

You can set seasonal autosaves without setting it to make a new backup file every time, just turn AUTOSAVE to SEASONAL but leave AUTOBACKUP as NO. Then it will save your game automatically every season, so at worst you will only need to go back to the start of the previous season. Personally I always leave this setting on, it's just a good habit in the case that your game does crash. (These settings are in d_init.txt, just so you know.)

[Starver]

Yup, I just like having them there, for security[1].  And sounds like OP currently needs them, for whatever reason, although uncompressed saving/whatever or just-not-the-same-bad-luck could make it equally as redundant.


[1] And it's not like it hits my HDD much (don't know about uncompressed saves, though).  But the size of the executable and support files responsible for the game, compared with the enjoyment it creates, is remarkable and highly favourable compared with many other comparable products one might mention.  Even with a highly uncompressed Raw-file system of descriptors...  Sorry, my mind just spinning along a thought of marvel.  This footnote is a definite derail, please ignore.