Character is deleted after blue screen

[Smith]

Hi community,

 

I just experienced what happens when windows (10) decides to do an update while playing 7 days (alpha 20.6 stable): 
Of course the sudden blue screen and restart of windows stops all current applications, but not properly.

When I restarted the game the map and blocks appeared to be saved, but the character was reset, like a new player joining for the first time: Level 1, with 0 Skill Points and starting items.

Does someone know how to prevent or reverse this problem? Is this bug already known?
Some loss of data until a certain point in the game play makes sense to me when windows crashes. But some part being saved completely and the other being reset/deleted completely seems odd. A sudden crash in the older versions was less problematic (experienced with alpha 13 - 15. Different skill system maybe origin?)

Greetings
 

[meganoth]

Data loss is random. The game is constantly writing to the savegame to record changes and any interupted write can corrupt any of the files in the savegame.

 

You could try to go into the savegame and locate your player files in the directory "Player". There are always backup files there and if you didn't start the game twice it could still have your old data.

 

If not, use "giveselfxp" in the console and the creative menue to give yourself the lost levels and items back. And if you want to be save from future blackouts make backups of the savegames regularily

 

 

[theFlu]

56 minutes ago, Smith said:

Does someone know how to prevent or reverse this problem? Is this bug already known?

The bug is well known, and installed on many, many computers on the world. The prevention is rather easy, just install a linux from the start. "Reversing" requires a little more work as you might want to try keep some of your data while you change your OS.

 

[Syphon583]

6 hours ago, Smith said:

Does someone know how to prevent or reverse this problem?

There is not much to do with the game files to reverse the corrupted data. There are a couple things you can try, but in my experience, unless you've manually backed up your save games on a regular basis (there are mods that will do this automatically for you), trying to recover corrupted data has never worked. There is always something weird about that save game file.

 

As far as Windows automatic restarts, just google how to change your Active Hours in Windows 10. Make sure those hours are set to times you are likely to play. Windows will not automatically restart within those times.

[Star69]

I think that I read somewhere in the Developer Diary that they are working on a way to change how the game saves information to try and address some of this. It was a mere mention but I haven't heard if they've been successful.

[SylenThunder]

Moved to the correct section of the forum. This is covered in the Pinned Support FAQ.

 

The issue is that the game is contantly reading and writing to the files. This isn't one of your flat 2D games like CyberPunk that only needs to update some minor character values once every 15 minutes. 7 Days is contantly working with gigabytes of world data and saving changes to your character constantly.

 

Any time you shut the computer down unexpectedly, you risk the loss of data in files that were actively being accessed. Not just the game, but critical system files can be corrupted as well.

 

If you're having blue screen errors when your system updates, you have some pretty critical issues you need to fix. Until then, there are Pinned instructions on how to recover the save when you encounter this issue.