Bug/Issue Ship/Save Corruption

Important Edit: I encourage everyone who stumbles upon this thread to visit Trinosaur's thread over here, compiling the many posts related to this issue.

So, there is a particular bug which causes players' ship progress to revert and, unfortunately, I am not the only one having variants* of this bug. The problem is, the only way to "FIX" the issue with the ships is by somehow going to admin commands and spawning in items to replace the stuff you've lost, including ship license upgrades, from your previous save as a work-around, but this does not get your ship back, you forever lose your previous ship and any items that were on it.

In fact, if the work-around is not attempted, and the player does not spawn in a different tier of ship license than the initial one, that ship's teleporter will not function and the bug may go on to affect main-story progress on the Ark.

Anybody else affected by losing progress on the Ark or losing entire characters, a work-around has not been found, and there may not be a suitable workaround with the most severely affected.



I don't think this bug has enough visibility on the forums here and I (personally) can't find anything that says the developers are aware of this bug. But after having the bug happen to me, replicating it, and reading about it, here's everything I've found regarding the issue:

On multiplayer, it occurs when a server crashes right when the victim is on their ship shortly before the crash, or more likely, when they attempt teleporting between the ship and another location. When they relog, they find that their ship has reverted completely to its initial state, all upgrades and items lost.

If the player affected is the host of the server, they will not be able to hop into single player mode on that character. (If the server does not have admin privileges, that player is effectively locked out of the work-around, since they can not activate admin mode, nor can anyone else.)

On Single Player, most of the cases found that include losing the ship and progress on single-player all have power outages, or computer crashes attributed to the trigger.

In BOTH cases, the teleporter on the ship is broken and can not be used after someone's progress has saved on the broken ship. In the most severe cases, seemingly where the person's progress saves during the bug without having applied the work-around, the loss of progress extends to the Ark and the main story quests, making the game effectively unplayable for that character if they've reached certain stages of the story.

(As for personal speculation on why the bug happens: )
It seems that the bug is triggered when the game is forced to an abrupt stop where it can not resolve to save/backup the player's files correctly; such as in the case of beaming in or out of the ship when the server experiences a crash, it is likely that the crash happens in the middle of the ship files being saved. In ideal situations, this would only roll-back that character and the ship to a previous point, but in the case of the bug, the files handling the ship and the Ark become unsynced from the rest of the player's information and revert completely, potentially trapping the player in certain circumstances where they are forced to make a new character. The only way to avoid the worst case scenario is to be very lucky and to apply the work-around immediately.

*This thread is also now including whole characters being rendered unplayable and progress on the Ark being reverted without the other two 'symptoms'. As far as I've replicated, I believe these issues may stem from the same bug, and the work-around does not apply. Godspeed to you brave explorers who have lost your characters.

Any additional information or corrections regarding the bug and its triggers are encouraged, I'm not perfect and may have missed something or replicated an issue incorrectly. Hopefully, some savvy people will look in on this thread and help isolate the issue.

 

Alright, I believe mine happened because I exit the game too quickly after saving

 

How do you go about that? Do you hit save-and-exit and then hit escape in the black screen, or at the main menu? Were you on a single player game, or a multiplayer game?

 

I was on Single Player, I pressed the Esc Button, chose Save and Exit, the main menu popped up almost immediately and I pressed Exit at themoment it appeared.

 

This bug occurred for me during multiplayer.
I was teleporting to a planet, server crashed halfway, logged back in after server came up and the ship was reset. No interaction would happen, the AI was sleeping, unable to beam. People could beam to me through party, but could not beam out using my teleporter.
Restoring backups/deleting universe file did not help, I ended up making a new character and just auto completing quests in single player until I was caught up with the old character.

OS is Win10, 64-bit.

 

Confirming that this is affecting me as well. A hard crash forced me to restart my computer while playing, and when I loaded up my character again, my ship was on its way to a random gentle star and I lost all my bookmarks.

 

This issue NEEDS to be addressed!

 

I agree with Trinosaur. I also found out that the case with the host being unable to join single player games is only the case if said character started straight in multiplayer, rather than in any single player universe. A bit strange, considering.

 

Waaait. I think I was traveling to another solar system when I Save&Quit!

 

Hopefully this will lure the devs here and take a look at it!
Ive had this happen to me personally 3 times now, and the other people on the server have had it happen once or twice also.

We have begun exiting out of the game every 15-20min and doing manual backups of our characters and ships JUST to be safe from this.

 

I told them about this on twitter but apparently they didn't know about all the reports in the support forum, which to me sounds more like its not checked that often because I come back here daily and I can see the amount of these types of complaints coming up so I am very confused how they can't notice it!

 

They probably have a lot on their plate, to be fair, as there are other issues that have popped up. But considering the importance of this, it's a shame they hadn't noticed it. Who knows, it might ultimately be a symptom of one of the issues they had already been looking into?

 

How else do you submit bugs like this? I would think they'd check an entire forum called "support."