Lost Progress After Power Outage - Will This Happen Every Time?

Discussion in 'Starbound FAQs, Q&A, and General Help' started by Mariel141, Aug 10, 2016.

  1. Mariel141

    Mariel141 Subatomic Cosmonaut

    I had a very sudden storm blow over with thunder and lightning (very very frightening) and a momentary power-outage while I was playing. After turning my computer off and waiting for the storm to pass, I booted up Starbound again to find that all of my teleport coordinates had disappeared, there were no artifacts in the doors, the Outpost had no quests completed, etc. etc...

    I know the 'find your world via storage folder' trick and was relieved to see my homeworld base was just as I'd left it, Fluffalos and all. What I'd like to know is, is there any way to prevent progress from being lost due to a crash or power outage? They are rare where I live, but it's not unheard of to lose power for just a second even on a clear day, and crashes can happen without warning. I was pretty far in the main quest and am more than a little annoyed to have to start all over - let alone think that I might have to over and over again.
     
  2. Garatgh Deloi

    Garatgh Deloi Master Astronaut

    Theres no way to prevent it.

    But the game do save a load of backup saves for the character that you can easily revert to if the main save got corrupted. Just rename/replace one of the backup files named .player.bak1-3 file to main .player.

    When it comes to the universe (including outpost) i would suggest makeing manual backups every time you start playing.
     
  3. Mariel141

    Mariel141 Subatomic Cosmonaut

    I will start doing that, but in the meanwhile I'm pretty annoyed. This seems like a big bug and I don't understand how the game could be considered a final release without fixing it, or at least alerting users to its existence so they can prepare for it. Any other big problems I should look out for?

    Oh and it seems I have to kill/rehatch all my Fluffalo and respawn all my tenants too. Sadness. I liked those guys.
     
  4. The | Suit

    The | Suit Agent S. Forum Moderator

    Game really can't fix you losing power.
    The game actively saves but there are backups stored in your storage folder labeled .bak1 bak2 etc.
    Just rename them.

    I suggest investing in a UPS ( Uninterrupted Power supply ) If power outages are common.
    They give about 5 - 30 minutes to be able to shutdown the computer properly when the power gets cut to prevent loss or corruption of data.

    https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Uninterruptible-Power-Supply-Units/b?ie=UTF8&node=764572
     
  5. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    To be quite honest, I really really don't understand why this is even possible, for the game to fumble that hard just because the power went out.

    You'd think that they would have programmed the game to, I don't know, include some sort of file integrity check whenever you go to load your character? I would simply do it like this:

    1). Every time the game goes to write to the file (perhaps once per 5 minutes), it includes a variable at the end kinda like a CRC or md5 in that it encompasses the whole file.
    2). It then makes a copy of this file, and throws a .bak extension on the end of it.

    IF the power goes out in the middle of play...

    1). Game loads the file and goes "hey wait, this file is corrupt." The game AUTOMATICALLY throws out the .player, .world, and other universe files and copies all copies from .bak when you load the game up.

    Therefore, we wouldn't have this sort of nonsense going on.

    My question is..... yes, we can't fix power outages, but we CAN fix error handling and what to do when save files are corrupt within the game. Why isn't the game automatically reloading the .bak1, .bak2 files when it sees the .player file is corrupt? And besides, you don't KNOW your player files have been corrupt until you load your character up.....which immediately overwrites your .baks....

    The game should obviously know the file is corrupt because it is throwing out data (teleport lists etc) when it loads.... so why even load that corrupt version AT ALL?

    Also, why aren't teleport lists saved in a separate file? That strikes me as something stupid to have in a file that is potentially volatile. The teleport list is never modified unless the PLAYER modifies it, therefore it shouldn't be auto-saved. It should ONLY be saved when the player modifies it.
     
  6. The | Suit

    The | Suit Agent S. Forum Moderator

    It is pretty dangerous to allow a computer to decide to automatically roll back a file.
    That is why no one does it. You are always prompted multiple times to revert to an earlier save.

    Same reason many games ask you to make multiple save points in case something bad happens.
     
  7. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    Last I checked, Starbound doesn't even tell you your file is corrupt, nor does it ask you if you want to revert to an older backup. Did they just add that in 1.0?

    EDIT: And again, Bookmarks and Teleport lists belong in a separate file. There is really no reason to include them in the highly volatile constantly-being-autosaved .player file. Losing your teleport/bookmark lists screws you bigtime and if they had only just put those in their separate file linked to the player, then you'd never lose them. The worst that'd happen is that you'd have an invalid teleport if a .world file got corrupt, but at least the REST of them should function properly.
     
  8. Mariel141

    Mariel141 Subatomic Cosmonaut

    No other game I have ever played does this when I lose power - at worst, I have to start from a previous save, but plenty of games these days have automatic saving, just as Starbound *appeared* to. And while power outages/crashes aren't common, (I can count on one hand the number of times they've happened since I moved here eight months ago) but they also aren't exactly predictable. By the time I knew about the 'Bak' files, my game had already saved over them with new ones. Progress totally lost.

    I have to agree with Xylia on this one. It seems really irresponsible to have it so easy to lose all of your progress and bookmarks. I was able to find my home planet easy enough, but all the settlements I bookmarked along the way to do quests and get crewmembers are lost in the dozens of other planets I've visited. I'm actually most annoyed that they don't even warn people that it could happen. I would have been making regular copies of my save files all along if I knew

    Which is easily handled. "Starbound detected that your save file is corrupt, possibly from a crash or power outage. Load back up save file Y/N?"
     
    Xylia likes this.

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