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Sharples88

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Mar 7, 2014
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  • Europa Universalis IV: Art of War
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I was playing as The Papal State on very hard with historical bonuses. I exited the game and when I came back to it the save and it's copy aren't there anymore.

  • Save file (including copy) is located Documents\Paradox Interactive\Europa Universalis IV\save games
  • It is not present in incompatible saves, it was local and not a cloud save.
  • It is located on my SSD with 23.0 GB remaining.
  • I am on the latest version (1.31.6.0)
  • The save file only had two graphical mods (Estate UI and Ad Lucem) - Save file still worked previously without them and had zero issues.
  • I have copied the save file and tried to rename it, it does not show up.
I have attached both save files if it helps.
 

Attachments

  • Papal State Very Hard.eu4
    7,5 MB · Views: 0
  • Papal State Very Hard_Backup.eu4
    7,5 MB · Views: 0
If the save file does not show in the game's Load menu, then it is not recognised by the game as a valid save file. IOW it is corrupted.

Hard to imagine that mods would do that, but on the other hand this is not a known issue with the game either. Did you have any sort of crash, hang or other problem while playing it?

I think your best shot is to post those saves over in User Mods; hopefully the experienced modders there can see wha the problem in the file it and fix it. Of course if it is too badly corrupted it may be unfixable.

I am sorry that happened to you, whatever the cause!
 
I had a look at the saves. The main save consists entirely of NULL-Bytes and the _Backup save is 1/4 NULL-Bytes. So the main file has no information left and the _Backup file is missing so much information that it would not be possible to recover a working save from it. Eu4 doesn't show them, because it doesn't recognize them as save files anymore.
on the other hand this is not a known issue with the game either.
This is the same issue which has caused startup crashes while showing a portrait, but an empty box for the hints(or at least the save files are broken in the same way). One of the early 1.30 patches fixed the startup crash, but whatever corrupts the saves was not addressed and there are still posts about this occasionally(I would say that I see a post about it once or twice a month).
I think it should be known to the developers, but I don't know if there is a current bugreport about it.
I don't know what is causing this problem. I think there might be circumstances outside of eu4 which contribute to this problem, but I think eu4 is also responsible in some way. Maybe it happens when the saving process is interrupted (power outages caused the problem in a few of the cases) or when the computer is switched off shortly after exiting eu4 without doing a clean shutdown. But somehow the NULL-Bytes must enter the files. This might be an attempt by eu4 to clean out the file before overwriting it in which case this could be prevented by always creating new files and deleting the old files afterwards so that an interrupted saving process leaves a working file. Or maybe a second _backup file would leave more time for the OS to write the files to the disk correctly. Or maybe the game could ask the OS to sync that file with the disk(at least when exiting). Of course all these things are just speculation, because I have no access to the source code of the game and don't know what the game actually does.

@Sharples88 maybe you might want to make a bugreport about this. You can quote my comment if you like to give some more information.

Disclaimer: I'm not working for Paradox. I'm just trying to help people.
 
Okay, an update on this, I think I found out what's been going on.

There's a chance when I reload the game (inside the game) and exit to main menu, it'll give me a BSOD. (Green for me since I'm on the Windows Insider build, Windows 10). This is pretty nasty since it corrupts the save file, so I have to force-exit EU4 instead. When I exited the game last time I was downstairs so I probably didn't even notice... my mistake. :(

If it helps I've never had this issue before 1.31, well, perhaps only one BSOD but that was like half a decade ago.
 
Do you always get a BSOD when you return to the main menu in the game? Eu4 is supposed to restart itself when you do that and for most people it works. If you can get a BSOD again, you could run dxdiag afterwards and post the output here and maybe AndrewT can figure out what is causing the BSOD.
And can you reproduce getting a corrupted save with such a BSOD? (of course don't try it with an important save). Of course a crash somewhere during the saving process could corrupt saves, but it is weird that it happens differently when restarting eu4(by going back to the main menu) and when exiting normally. Maybe that is something which could be investigated in a bugreport
 
My experience is that BSoD are almost always hardware or driver problems. Next time you get one please record the BSoD screen itself, that can help determine the area of the problem.