Factorio Forums

Tried to load the game, and about 3/4 of the way through the progress bar it stops, and I get the error popup. Last save on this map that did load was about 30 hrs ago (on a roughly 73 hr map). This occurs on a completely vanilla game.

The last time I played was 13Oct21.

A few other old games also load properly. I tried loading the save that doesn't work from another game, but that failed as well. All of the autosaves also failed to load.

This is the third corrupted save file you posted. You should test your system for hardware issues, run https://www.memtest.org/#downiso for several hours or until it shows an error.

I am running the test on my main system now, and at 67% have 2 addresses that failed. I guess I'll be looking to get new RAM.

A couple of questions that popped into my head are why wouldn't a memory issue that doesn't allow for loading of a save crash the game in the first place? Or is the issue only occurring when reading the RAM and writing the save file, but if that is the case why are all of the autosaves unable to load as well? These may just be my lack of understanding of hardware and programing but I see this as a good time to learn something.

Most of the sanity checks are only done when loading the save not while playing or saving so as long as it does not crash you only notice it afterwards. You can still try a bios update and increasing the memory voltage before replacing it.

Zeon0MS wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 6:01 pm I am running the test on my main system now, and at 67% have 2 addresses that failed. I guess I'll be looking to get new RAM.

A couple of questions that popped into my head are why wouldn't a memory issue that doesn't allow for loading of a save crash the game in the first place? Or is the issue only occurring when reading the RAM and writing the save file, but if that is the case why are all of the autosaves unable to load as well? These may just be my lack of understanding of hardware and programing but I see this as a good time to learn something.

Crashing generally happens more often when it's executable code that gets corrupted. If it's just some data stored in RAM it's quite possible for that data to simply never be touched, and thus you won't see any issues despite the corruption. For most things, the size of code is vastly less than the size of everything else it's keeping in RAM, so the chance of executable RAM being corrupted is much lower.

As an example, it's fairly frequent that you'll see saves fail to load due to a tile ID that's incorrect. If one gets corrupted in RAM, the game may not notice it because there can easily be millions of tiles, which may not even be visible due to having something placed on it, and so far away from anything going on the chunk isn't even loaded. The data doesn't get touched until the game saves, and there all it has to do is write whatever value it sees. It's only on loading a save that the game actually needs to examine the value so it can set some things it needs up again (like say calculating the pollution absortion for the chunk), then it sees theres a problem and can't load the save.

You can try and check for corruption during the save, and recent posts suggest that some were added recently, but you can't catch everything and people already found saving to be much slower from the few checks they did add.