Factorio Forums

The problem with very big save files > 90MB have "returned"

Looks like a memory issue. (1.3 GB used)

win7-64bit

Well, unless you upload the savegame somewhere we can't inspect it.

All right here it is on the dropbox - UHC2

Sorry for that omission

I had this problem too. I started playing factorio with the 0.10.3 version and after a couple tens of gameplay hours, the game started freezing noticeably during auto-save.

I checked the saves directory and noticed the save file occupying 250MB. Opening the zip file, the replay file was taking most of the space.

Since I couldn't find an easy way to disable the replay, I installed a minor, non-game changing mod, which made the game disable the replays and reduce the save file to 20MB.

No more freezes since then.

micomico wrote:I had this problem too. I started playing factorio with the 0.10.3 version and after a couple tens of gameplay hours, the game started freezing noticeably during auto-save.

I checked the saves directory and noticed the save file occupying 250MB. Opening the zip file, the replay file was taking most of the space.

Since I couldn't find an easy way to disable the replay, I installed a minor, non-game changing mod, which made the game disable the replays and reduce the save file to 20MB.

No more freezes since then.

In my case the level.dat takes most of the space (86MB of 91MB) as i look through the zip.

Edit: Game was created and played on v. [0.10.6] solely.

I guess you have explored a good chunk of your map for the level.dat to increase that much.

Maybe Factorio should take the lead of Alpha Minecraft, and start saving chunks by region in different files inside the zip? This won't reduce the save size, but you'll only have to write the changed regions to file. Writing several KBs is much faster than writing several MBs.

micomico wrote:I guess you have explored a good chunk of your map for the level.dat to increase that much.

Maybe Factorio should take the lead of Alpha Minecraft, and start saving chunks by region in different files inside the zip? This won't reduce the save size, but you'll only have to write the changed regions to file. Writing several KBs is much faster than writing several MBs.

Map after 4 hours game time

Actually it is fairly early in the game with only the closest parts of the map explored.

Edit: It may be the map generation options:

I changed the crc saving in replay to be once per second instead of once per tick (60Xsecond), this should make the replays a lot of smaller.

So I believe it should be fixed for 0.10.9

I'm happy if my problem helped improving the game.
Whether this change will fix this map is uncertain. As mentioned my save file is mostly level.dat, which I guess gets filled with biters running around their bases.
Perhaps the bases on the other side of the south sea sends attacks and they have trouble finding a path around the sea.

I have observed a savegame which was getting rather big, suddenly schrank in size (80Mb -> 10Mb) so there already exist some mechanism in the game code that 'fixes' this - sometimes.