Factorio Forums

The game crashes while saving

Useful information:
Platform: Nintendo Switch.
Version of game: 2.0.47 (build 82606, arm64-ns)
File size of save: 71MB
Error message: The software was closed because an error occurred. (OK)

Actual behaviour:

My most recent save of my game has started crashing. This mostly happens when the game is saving including auto saving.

The game will save with the progress bar appearing and starting to fill then a white system error message appears and takes me back to the home screen of the Nintendo switch.

Expected behaviour:

Ideally, the game would save.

However, if an issue was to arise, I would expect a message to appear informing the player of what is preventing the save, provide any useful information to fix it and possibly allow them to keep playing or troubleshoot the issue to prevent loss of progress.

Troubleshooting:

I first had crashing issues when my safe storage was full, the crash would appear in a very similar situation to the above. I found that removing old save files allowed me to continue playing so I suspect this has something to do with the gigabyte limit on total saves on the Nintendo Switch system.

As seen in the attached image, I now have plenty of save storage however the error still occurs fairly consistently.

About the save:

In this particular save I have started expanding my logistics network to distant oilfields.
So there’s a lot are many logistics and construction bots travelling great distances.

No attachments are on your post? There are limited options for exporting a Save from the Switch; I find it easier to work with a Multiplayer server myself.

71MB is pretty big for a Switch save game file. You may simply be hitting a system Memory Limit, since the Switch 1 only makes 3GB available to Applications.

I always play with the Ribbonworld map presets on the Switch, which makes the map only Infinite in 1 direction. You can set the size in the Advanced tab of the map generation settings. This does change gameplay quite a bit - you only have to defend 2 Edges, not an entire Perimeter - but importantly it reduces the amount of unused Map tiles that have to be processed & stored.

Good Luck!

Sorry I was going to attach when I first drafted the thread, but then realised I couldn’t really from my phone. I thought I’d removed the references to any attachments though?

I’m not sure how I can pull a save file from the switch to put it on my thread, if I could, I would!

I tried connecting to a LAN multiplayer game on my computer, but I think because I don’t have Nintendo online subscription?

The game runs pretty well on the switch, it just crashes when saving, a real shame that’s holding it back for me atm and imho a bug that should be addressed.

The ribbon world is a good shout and something I’ll try in a future game for sure

Adding more entities (such as a Logistic network expansion) will cause more Memory to be used. The Save function also has to use extra Memory to prepare the Savegame.zip. Eventually, something exceeds the system’s limit and it crashes.

You can also try making your current Savegame smaller. This can be done in the Scenario Editor to take advantage of Instant Deconstruction tools to delete parts of your factory that you do not need, or other entities like Trees, Fish, Enemies, and Decoratives on the ground. The editor also lets you “Edit map gen settings” to convert the game to a Ribbonworld. From the Chat Console you can run a command to remove existing chunks from the map.

Good Luck!

I got the save file from the user.
It was indeed a case of map being too large, reaching the limits of RAM for the console.
In such cases setting the sprite resolution to Medium in Graphics Settings will allow you to play a little longer.

I will try to investigate more memory optimizations.