Game Erasing Glitch Deletes 35 Days of Gameplay! Can I PLEASE Get It Back?

[Pharose]

I was over 35 days into my game on Stalker when it just disappeared on me after experiencing a few glitches. This game was my 9^th attempt at surviving in Forlorn Muskeg on Stalker difficulty and it was the culmination of months of gameplay and frustration. 

I started the game in Forlorn Muskeg and I finally achieved my goal of surviving 30 days without leaving FM, but I ran out of matches, cloth and scrap metal so I decided that I would head to Mystery Lake instead of letting myself die. ML was incredibly easy compared to FM but this time I lost my game to a glitch instead of losing it to the wolves! I got my first case of cabin fever so I packed up some firewood and fish hooks and went out to the fishing huts to spend the night. I loaded the oven with 8+ hours of firewood and made some water for drinking, and cooked a piece of wolf meat. I ate the wolf meat, which gave me the usual risk of parasites, which saved my game but then I noticed there was a glitch with my cursor. The windows mouse icon was flickering in and was half visible and my screen movements were sluggish, like I was stuck half way between my game and the windows desktop. I wasn’t able to click on anything or open any menus, so I alt-tabbed the game and brought it back up to see if it would fix it. I didn’t fix it and so I was stuck in the fishing hut, unable to do anything except wiggle my FOV a little bit from side to side. I couldn’t quit the game either because the controls weren’t responding so I just alt-tabbed the game, right clicked on it and selected “close”. I figure it wouldn’t be a big deal because the game had just saved itself but when I started TLD again I found that I only had 4 saved sandbox games where before I had 5. My game had disappeared, as if I had just died, even though my HP was high and I wasn’t in any danger at all!

I don’t know if it has any relevance to my problem but I recently had some other glitches where I had to quit out of my game. The other glitches were all related to the main entrance of the large cabin at Mystery Lake (which I think has been reported by other people). When exiting out this door I twice found myself in a situation where I was below ground level and falling into an infinite abyss. I quickly hit esc and quit the game before I found out if the fall would kill me. I experienced another glitch twice while entering through this door where I spawned on top of the interior structure where I had to fall “through” the roof to enter the cabin, but once inside I found that it was completely empty and all my gear was gone. Luckily this glitch fixed itself when I exited the building and entered again (this time through the back door). I have no idea if these glitches are related to my game-erasing glitch but they did happen shortly before.

In case if my preamble hasn’t made it clear I am really choked that I lost my game for no reason at all. It took me a lot of effort and frustration to survive FM and you can even read about my frustration in the thread I made in “Alpha Playtest Feedback” about the difficulty of wolves (http://www.hinterlandforums.com/index.php?/topic/14733-wolves-are-still-too-numerous-and-vicious/). This game was my final triumph against this insane difficulty so you can imagine I am pretty pissed that it just disappeared due to a glitch! Please tell me there’s some way that you can restore save game files?!

 

 

[FINDarkside]

Take a look at your save folder, it's possible that the save is still there, but just corrupted. Save files are usually at C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Hinterland\TheLongDark.

[Carbon]

 First, sorry to hear about your situation and I can empathize with your frustration. However, as far as I know, there is no way to restore game files. They are stored locally, so perhaps you can have a look in the save folder (For which you must show hidden folders and files: C:/users/<username>/AppData/Local/Hinterland) and see if the files remain. I doubt that they will be there if the game cannot see them. If they are there, then they were likely corrupted by the crash which would sadly be quite normal.

 Perhaps look at your system events for an error or some clues as to what happened to at least prevent this from happening again?

 Edit:Beaten to it!

[Pharose]

Hmm, it looks like you're both right. I can see a save file in my folder that matches the date of the last time I played. Is there a log of system events somewhere?

Would the game-file be of any use to Hinterlands for debugging purposes?

[Carbon]

The system log will be within Windows: Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Event Viewer. You will need to look for events that happened on that date and time, so it will need to be quite a thorough search. It will turn up something though. Keep us posted!

[FINDarkside]

Hi, I can take a look at your save file and see how bad it is. It's possible that only one of the files is corrupted, and possibly even fixable. If you're interested, post or pm me your save folder.

[Support]

The game automatically tries to recover saves that are corrupted, however it sounds like something caused the game to crash while writing out save data. Unfortunately you would have had to grab the log from after the crash for it to be useful to us, as it's replaced each time you launch the game. The bigger question is why did you game crash, though. If it happens again please grab the log from (found in .../install directory/tld_data/output_log.txt )

You can email the save to support@hinterlandgames.com and we can take a look at it, but it's likely damaged and not recoverable. 

@FINDarkside - We ask that you do not offer to try to fix people's save files as you don't have the tools to do this safely, unless you've modified the project or are using a trainer. This could result in invalidating achievements or loss of other data. While we appreciate you offering to help people, this is not something we can support on the forums and we ask that people don't offer to edit/change other Users files. We consider this a violation of the "no mods" rule for the forum. 

[Pharose]

Thanks for the offer Darkside but I don't think I'm going to risk it. I'll email the save to support but yeah I'm not expecting any miracles. 

More importantly I think the glitch may be persisting. I went back to my older game that I started last June, (but I still played it last January) and I'm experiencing some familiar glitches. Now I am facing a glitch so that when I enter the trappers cabin I find myself in a black void that resembles being inside my snow shelter outside the cabin (the place from where my save game starts). When I exit this so called "snow shelter" I once again find myself below ground level as I fall into an infinite abyss. This happens every time I enter the cabin and I've made several attempts so far. I'm posting some screenshots, the first two are from lakeside cabin when I enter through the front door, the next two are from when I enter the trapper's cabin.

I have a feeling this may be related to my game becoming corrupted. I tried verifying the game cache and that did not fix it. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game and that did not fix it.

[Pharose]

Oh god,  it appears that my game is corrupt as hell! I tried playing my old save game again and I spent a night outside of the trappers cabin cooking up my pile of bear meat. I got my cooking skill quite a bit and went back to sleep in my snow shelter. When I woke up my cooking skill was back down to where it started the previous day!

Undeterred i continued my mission over to the camp office and I entered through the back door. When I entered I encountered the exact same glitch that I got when I entered the trapper's cabin! I exited my phantom snow shelter to see what would happen and I fell through the infinite abyss, until eventually I hit the ground and I found myself in the trappers cabin... But this was an empty version of the camp office without any of my loot. So I went to exit the cabin but when I did so I found myself back in my SNOW SHELTER next to the trapper's cabin! 

I've been playing this game for over two years and I never encountered any terrible glitches but right now the game is basically unplayable!

[Pharose]

I've been pretty desperate to find a solution to this so I tried dismantling my snow shelter and then entering the trappers cabin. When I entered the cabin I did not appear on the other side of the door but in the middle of the cabin looking towards the entrance (as if it was another default spawn point). The cabin was empty except for one rifle cleaning kit. When I exited the cabin I teleported to one of the starting spawn locations just outside of the clear cut. 

The game seems slightly less glitchy now but it's still unplayable!

[Support]

I've replied to your email with some info/update.