Sometimes after the game crashes the character that I've been playing will disappear. I have Steam Cloud completely turned off so that isn't what's causing it. I think it most often happens following crashes associated with either changing floors (either going down a floor or entering/exiting the pocket dimension) or (somewhat more predictably) saving the game. EDIT: I'm playing with permadeath off and I have several mods running
I've been encountering this as well, although I do have the Steam cloud active. It's very annoying, as I've lost a dozen hours and outright lost a few characters. The autosave directory gets eaten, just like the character died, but I have been playing with mods and using permadeath so I'm not sure if it would affect an unmodded game that wasn't using permadeath in the same way.
Warning, the following is conjecture: I am wondering if this is intrinsic to some kind of access or write issue (though one imagines that would be more consistent), and that the save procedure works by first flushing out old files and then writing in the new. After getting caught halfway in this process...bad things! Again, just conjecture, could be something completely else.
I don't think that is the case, just now I had a crash where I lost my Autosave file, as well as the files that were generated when I hit "Save and continue" in a game without permadeath enabled. The folders for the characters survive the crash, but every file inside them is eaten as if the character has died. I've now lost over half a dozen characters this way, strangely it seems as though another of my characters was destroyed in the process, I lost the character Septa permadeath character when I lost my Tavi save in this most recent crash. I'd say that it was some sort of issue with the Steam Cloud functionality, but the Op has it disabled. I'll disable my Steam Cloud tomorrow and putter around a few hours until the game crashes. I'll also test and see if I can determine what caused multiple characters saves to be lost, I left my Septa save intact, started Tavi to check and see if having a character without permadeath enabled would keep the files from disappearing thinking that perhaps a false death call was being made at the time of the crash. I'll note that the surviving Septa file was made when I utilized Save and Quit, and then reloaded the game from the main menu, the game crashed and I lost hours of progress before I decided to try no permadeath and made Tavi, I made another character before him with permadeath, and that character survived. So it basically ate two characters who weren't created during the same play session, the first of which had survived its own loss of autosave during a previous crash. I saw the game, loaded it, decided to restart and used save and quit to go back to the menu. So the file was accessed during the same play session as the subsequent crash that devoured it, however as I said I made another character, took a few steps and hit save and quit to test a character without permadeath.
Just to update, I disabled Steam Cloud this morning and started to play a game, upon using save and quit to get a save just in case the game decided to crash on me, I noticed that the last several games that had disappeared (I looked in the documents/gaslampgames/ folders for them, and they were just empty folders) are back. I should note that I was getting the error message after the crash that the Steam Cloud couldn't sync my saves, but I get that a lot in games after a crash and since I generally only play on the one machine it has never affected my ability to load the most recent save in a game before. So apparently there's some sort of Steam Cloud issue, I'll continue to play until the game crashes and see if I do indeed continue to have the same issue as the Op with the disappearing saves. I'm finding this quite baffling, but if I can manage to get a solid repro I'll list my mods here and also disable my mods and see if I can recreate the crash and loss of savegames without them.
I've been getting the same problem recently concerning autosaves - (sometimes) when the game crashes, my autosaves get blown up and my savegame gets corrupted, even though the files for the character save are there (not the autosaves). Also when I try to load the game, it says 'Could not load mod - Heraldic shields'. Not sure if that means that it's that mod which crashes it or what. I've had steam cloud off since I got the game. Out of interest, what mods are you running? I've got these running: Heraldic Shields Swashbucklers Advanced Craft'n'Smelt Compleat Essential Skills More Rooms Mod Interior Dredmorating FaxPax Wind Magic More Dred (Item Pack) Jay's Mega Phoneme Mod Death by 1000 Taunts Extra Potions War Weaver Druid Magic Astartes Mo' Steampunk
That's an issue I've had, but its not the one I was talking about here. A workaround for that issue is to make a backup copy of each new character and if you get the "couldn't load mod" error you copy every file beginning with the word mod from the backup into the current file
Ah, right, sorry. Thanks for the workaround though! Edit: Actually I think I do have your problem as well - my game has crashed twice now on leveling up, each time the char's save file disappears. Edit Edit: I've resorted to using Cobian Backup as a temp fix to backup my character's saves every 30 minutes since I don't particularly want to lose it.
I've been having this same issue lately myself. I'll have to start backing up my own saves now, until they can fix this...
