Factorio Forums

Hello,

I recently was playing a scenario map and noticed that every 2/3 minutes my game stopped for 5 seconds and then resumed, like it was autosaving. The console kept giving a message "Couldn't write to output file." Now I was okay with this, but then I found it also just wasn't saving. Not autosaving and also not possible when trying to save manually. Then something weird happened. My power lines stopped connecting to eachother and all that didn't have power yet wasn't able to get any power anymore. All that was powered kept powered even after removing the electricity poles. I have taken some screenshots:

http://imageshack.com/a/img834/7779/6z1a.png
http://imageshack.com/a/img845/6831/vfwk.png
http://imageshack.com/a/img843/8595/x27d.png
http://imageshack.com/a/img835/7634/rfrz.png
http://imageshack.com/a/img838/876/mbrr.png

I wasn't able to upload a savegame since it, well... wouldn't save. I do have the scenario file I used, which only worked after turning off a mod (Timebuttons). Strange thing is that the buttons weren't turned off but they didn't work either. I edited the scenario a bit. All I did was increase the ores amount. Here's the file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wykrgkfmxeg5nty/Islandmap.rar

System specs
OS: Windows 7 32-bit SP1
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q9550 @ 2.83 GHz
RAM: 4GB (3.5GB Usable 'cause of windows...)
Videocard: ATI Radeon HD4650
I have the latest drivers for my videocard.

Hopefully you can help me out...

if you use mods you have to tem them of and restar game (delete crop-cache.dat may help)
a new download for the game can fix this as well.

p.s. you like my map?

Im having same problem, glad its not just me, i want to play so bad, had about 27 hours into my save file...id just start over but i feel same thing will just happen again. but such is alphas.

some think like this https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =11&t=2723 ?

I have this problem too (0.9.8) I am almost 100% sure it is an issue with RAM and RAM management during the saving process. Here's what happens

The game works absolutely fine up to a certain point. Once my game gets to a certain size, trying to save the game throws up the error "Couldn't write to output". However, I managed to get through this wall by freeing up RAM in various ways such as closing programs. I also resorted to using a program I last used in the late 90s called "FreeRAM" which is designed to free-up space on the RAM occupied by stuff that doesn't need to be there anymore. It worked and I was able to put another ~5 hours into the game.

Now I've hit the wall again and there's nothing I can do. Here are the details. With the program running, my system shows approximately 1.6 GB of RAM used with 1.4 GB remaining (I have 3GB in total). When the save process starts, there is a sharp increase in the RAM used by factorio, but only about 100 MB. Immediately after that increase, the game throws up the error "couldn't write to output".

Sometimes the previous save game is corrupted during this process! So you not only lose the progress you made since the last save but the last save too! I have started to back-up each save game so that I can recover it manually.

Factorio generally seems to be very RAM-hungry. For example, simply starting up the game and without loading a save game, just getting to the main menu, the game uses 800MB of RAM! That seems a very large amount for what is just a menu. Also, the minimum requirements of the game is 500MB of RAM, but the main menu is using 800 MB? There must be something wrong here. After running FreeRAM, this drops to just 30MB. That's more like it...

I should note that my hard drive has plenty of space left.

I'm running on a laptop with specs:

Win7
3GB RAM
Dual core @3 GHz
6600M GT

running factorio 0.9.8

Lee_newsum wrote:if you use mods you have to tem them of and restar game (delete crop-cache.dat may help)
a new download for the game can fix this as well.

p.s. you like my map?

Well, it worked fine before I edited the map a bit in the editor, so I don't think it's the mods
I will see if it works without them.

And yes, I like it so far although the only thing I didn't like was that the ores were only 500 big... I always like to build a huge factory but that isn't possible if your resources run out all the time

Seems like a duplicate of https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 1&start=10
In 0.10.1 there has been a fix for the RAM issue. Basically before, the game would try to save into the memory first and then write to disk. Which could have failed because it required a big block of continuous memory. Now this is buffered, so much less memory is needed.

Please try this in the 0.10.1 and if it still fails then speak up. Moving to duplicates.