[1.1.76] Crash on save "Targeter for class LogisticRobot was saved but the targetable instance wasn't saved"

[buxomant]

Been running this save quite a while now, have a pretty large base running city blocks & trains. I realized way too far into the game that my train stations were set up slightly sub-par (intersections were too large, on & off ramps could be placed better), so of course I went ahead & tried to fix them (cue "one eternity later" meme).

Because I had hundreds of blocks at this point, I was mostly copy-pasting and relying on bots to do the work (~100k logistics and ~100k construction bots). But also because I stupidly use way too many chests for loading & unloading *and* I forgot to limit how far they could be filled, I had immense buffer bloat all over the place. So I had all 100k construction bots apparently busy moving materials to storage chests, just to be able to move a bunch of chests used in loading/unloading trains a couple inches up/right.

I would do this in batches, wait for the swarm to kick up, and leave it running for several minutes/hours before coming back to it. More recently I noticed semi-frequent crashes (1-2 per day), sometimes when I'm just leaving it running in the background, with the same error saying "Targeter for class LogisticRobot was saved but the targetable instance wasn't saved". Not sure what's causing it but I think it's happening during autosaves specifically (though not all autosaves).

When I jump back in, I notice there's a "_autosave1.tmp.zip" file which often fails to load, so I have to reload a previous save. I've attached the broken temp file, the most recent save that works, and the current log generated in the crash, let me know if there's anything else I can provide to help.

Running the latest version (at the time of writing), all vanilla with no mods (technically I had a bunch of mods installed back in 2020, but they no longer work with Factorio 1.0+, so they've been disabled from what I can tell).

[Rseding91]

Thanks for the report. Do you have any reliable way to reproduce this crash? Steps like: "set auto-save to 1 minute, load this save file, wait 1 minute and 17 seconds and it crashes on running auto-save"?

Also, have you had any other computer issues recently?

[buxomant]

Steps like: "set auto-save to 1 minute, load this save file, wait 1 minute and 17 seconds and it crashes on running auto-save"?

Unfortunately for troubleshooting (but fortunately for my gameplay), I've not been able to reproduce it consistently. Whenever I load an earlier save, I don't see it crashing the same way, at least not immediately. I'll try setting the autosave from 5 minutes to 1, and see if I can get it to happen consistently.

Also, have you had any other computer issues recently?

Yeah, tbh I have -- maybe once or twice a week I find the computer completely frozen after leaving it running idle for a while (though usually not completely idle, it's running Factorio in the background).

For context, I switched platforms from AM4 to AM5 back in December, and I upgraded my CPU, mainboard, RAM & NVMe SSD all at the same time, and I think the issues started around that time. Windows is running off the new SSD, but Factorio is installed on an older SSD I've had for years.

I tried running Windows memory diagnostic today, and it didn't find any issues. I also ran a disk utility (HDD Sentinel), and it couldn't find problems with my storage drives either.

[buxomant]

I think this can be closed now -- I'm no longer able to reproduce the issue, after updating my mainboard's BIOS. I left the game running for ~6 hours, and it didn't crash once since the update.

My best guess is that this was a fairly new board and they didn't iron out all the kinks at launch. My previous BIOS build was dated November 2022, and there had been 2-3 new revisions since then. It's not even the first time I had to do a BIOS update, the version it originally shipped with couldn't even support 6000 MT/s RAM out of the box (it just crashed during POST and reset to the base 4800, even though the RAM was rated for 6000).

Amazingly stable game, you were right to suspect hardware issues above anything else