So yeah i finally go the game running nice and smooth etc and been playing it for about 17 hours now. The problem is that i can't load my last save without my computer crashing. I'm down in vault 34 and any time i try to load my saves there, i have one quicksave and one autosave, the game crashes! The only other saves i have is like 8-9 hours of gameplay before my last save. What for the love of god am i suppose to do? Is there any way to fix this? I've done so much in 8-9 hours, countless quests, new companions, higher lvl, new area etc. did i seriously just lose all that?

I just wasted about 2 1/2 hours in Vault 3 after randomly exploring it. My auto and quicksaves were causing a CTD. Loading a manual save within the vault 3 and going outside without talking to a quest character, I did a quick save in the wastelands and it cause a CTD upon reloading. So I loaded up a save prior to my exploration of Vault 3, did a quick save and reload and all is well, no CTD.

Staying away from Vault 3 unless I have a quest that leads me there and even then I'll be making special manual saves before entering that area.

your most likely out of luck...

My advice use quicksaves regularly but make a fresh new manual save every 20 mins or so, that way you always have a semi recent fallback should your saves start to fail... i have 71 saves on my comp.... im sorted should some recent save fail

I just want to ask will the new patch fix the load crash problem because if it will i just have to wait ?........ BUT if not then its time to forget about my 20 hours of playing the game and start from scratch.......

Your assuming that there will be a patch; I've seen nothing official saying they are going to do anything.

Excellent advice - me too!
The only other advice I could give would be Playing Cards - lose them all, they're bugged.
I'm level 22 and ~85 hours in, and I just cleaned out Vault 34 last night (with two companions) no problems.
Well, heavy rads (even with the Space Suit I went through like 50 Rad-X!) but no crashing.
Dunno what has happened to your saves though...?
Of course there will be patches! Probably many between now and the end of the year.
Hope you get help one way or another,
Regards

Actually they are aware of it and will be fixed in upcoming patch, a dev stated this in the big CTD thread that's about 10 pages long.

Yeah thanks for all the tips. I knew that some people had problems with saves so i just figured if quicksaved regularly i'd be alright :rolleyes: Guess i might as well start from scratch with a new character. It's just to painfull to play on the same char knowing what i lost Kinda furious at obsidian too at moment if i have to be completly honest. Because well i could blame it on my self thinking i should be saving more often etc. but when it comes down to it it's utterly 100% their fault. Ah just had to get that off my chest, alright.

A dev stated this is the top priority right now. However, a fix for the bug will not fix your save files. The bug is not with loading the save files, but with the game generating malformed information that causes subsequent saves to become corrupted. That will be patched, however your save files are and will still be corrupted. Someone would have to write a utility to strip or replace the malformed information from a corrupted save file.

I'm working on such a utility right now but I can't complete it until I know exactly what variables are having invalid values assigned to them and what the acceptable replacement values would be. I'm very inexperienced in writing save game editor utilities like this though so I don't have a whole lot of confidence that my effort is going to pay off any time soon.

Whoa, I didn't think about those playing cards being bugged. Are you talking about the singular ones that all the vendors are offering as maybe that is why I keep crashing at every vendor out in the wastes lately (since yesterday). I was buying up the single cards anytime they were offered just in case I might need them so do you think that might be my CTD as of late. I have over 60 hours of gameplay in and even found the Vertibird crash site and got that great gun there. My post here is titled "Error 80 and other issues" but haven't gotten one person to reply yet from early this morning and I am getting kindof frustrated. I had been playing 4-6 hours at a time and usually only one crash sometime in that time frame but now I am getting a crash anytime I go to an outside vendor when I hit accept I crash and a lot of other ways as well and that all started day before yesterday when I had to stop becasue I kept crashing trying to buy some stuff from a vendor walking out in the wastes but as I said each time I was also buying some of those single cards as well. Then I started getting that error 80 last night and couldn't get into the game at all or it would tell me that I couldn't connect to the cloud.

I would really, really, REALLY appreciate if you could make such a utility. This annoying save/load problem has happened to me also and the latest valid game save is about 12 hours earlier in gameplay time. I'm afraid though that one should have in-depth knowledge about the contents and structure of the save files (or at least what causes their corruption) in order to make a tool to recover them - and i guess only the FO:NV developers have this kind of knowledge, which i doubt they'd be willing to share. It would be awesome if they would do such a utility themselves, actually, in order to try to compensate for the customer complaints.

Anyway, let me know if you think i could help with anything (i have some programming skills, although, like i said, without any knowledge of the save file structure it's worse than a needle-in-the-haystack problem).
One hint that i think could be relevant is that it might have something to do with companions (e.g. my saves got corrupted shortly after entering Vault 11, when Boone stopped following me for no apparent reason).

I wouldn't trash any corrupted saves quite yet. When asked whether currently crashing saves were worthless and should be abandoned, a staff member over at Bethesda's blog site advised a poster to hang on to them. I'd take this with a grain of salt, but perhaps they know a bit more about this issue than what's currently being discussed. One can only hope...

Yes - get rid of all Playing Cards!
Also, are you playing the same game on different computers at the same time?
If you are not, for goodness sake disable the whole Steam Cloud nonsense.
Some people believe that will also disable achievements - but it does not.
Stupid Playing Cards (grrrrrr....)
L8R

No, just the one and thanks because it had crossed my mind earlier today whether I should uncheck that box for the cloud. Also last night I went into the Steam and into the properties section for FNV and did the check the integrity of the game's files thing and it found a file that it said it would restore or something of that nature and I was able to get into the game once again and play for several hours before crashing but I went right back in and played for a few more hours after that. For the record I have two nvidia GTX 480's in SLI with the current drivers installed and am running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. This time though i didn't buy any cards some any of the vendors so no crashes from that anyway. I still have a bunch of them though back at my room in Novac. Should I get rid of those as well or are they ok if they aren't on my person? I am still getting some lagging here and there but I have 2 companions with me, ED-E and Boone. I shouldn't have any lag at all though with the 2 powerhouses I have for video cards and they are also OCed to 850/1700/2000. I have an Intel QX9650 quad core that is at 3.6Ghz and then 4GB of DDR3. I sure didn't have this much trouble with Fallout 3 and I only had two 9800GTX pluses in SLI when I was playing that. I sure hope they get all the bugs sorted out in our lifetime... ;O) Thanks for the input too!

You can keep your playing cards if your on the pc you need to sell them all to a vendor or get a house mod to store all your stuff in.

Wouldn't my room in Novac or what you get when you get to New Vegas be ok then? I don't even know why I started collecting them and haven't looked around on the net to find out either. I just figured since they were being offered that they would probably be useful once I got to New Vegas so I started collecting them. It's odd to me though that crashing to desktop didn't start happening when I hit accept buying them from an outside vendor until now. I had already bought a ton of them all over the place and had just bought some from an inside vendor (can't remember the name of where I was at the moment) with no problem and had around 70 hours worth of gameplay already with only random crashes here and there after playing for hours on end. Thanks for the advise though, every little bit of info helps with this game. I don't remember ever having this much of a problem with a game the entire time I have been playing which is many moons grasshopper. ;O) Like I said though what seemed to help me the most was doing the "verify integrity of games cache" thing in the games properties on Steam. It would have been interesting to know which file it couldn't find but that is what it said that a certain file would be added next time I played. "One (1) file failed to validate and will be reacquired" is actually what it said. Not that I wouldn't add a mod as I have seen some pretty great add on room mods but I think I just want to wait to start adding mods and all that until I have played through once and then the game isn't already fulls of bugs or as many bugs after some substantial updates have been offered.

It should work putting them somplace else the cards are used for playing carvan I do believe against npcs. That about sums up the cards.... Yeah I run into the same thing with the files on steam.... and yeah no idea what ones they are exactly just sounds like something bad though the steam vershion of the game sadly its the only vershion we get no matter hard copy/digital dnload etc... But for game file sizes as you collect more stuff/ more cards/ more ammo and save it away your safe file gets bigger and bigger at around 5-6 megs is when I am like Ok time to start getting rid of stuff, trashing it, selling it, jury rigging good things I want to keep. To help keep the saved games data base down and the game a bit more bug free. Cards since I dont play carevan with the card bug issue, I dont get the cards, and sold the ones I have and will not buy newones or loot any until they fix the issue in whatever patch they take care of it in. Just want to play the game, already played though it three times=) Also found work arounds on my own in buggy areas caugh caugh ultra lux bath house caugh caugh, the thorn caugh caugh....

Wow, three times already? Man, I am still just rummaging around in the wastes just looking for stuff. Like I found the crashed Vertibird and weapon there and other good stuff. I have yet to find anything special regarding armor but I am sure I will. You just went straight through the main quest then right? I just finished speaking to the Kahns as far as the story line goes and am currently running an errand for the Brotherhood. I found them totally by accident too but I was glad to see them since they probably are still necessary for getting to use the power armor but I am not sure since it hasn't come up yet. I am using generalities as I don't want to spoil anything for anyone. I haven't been to the places you (cough) mentioned yet. I love the whole mucking about trying to find good stuff thing almost as much as the main story line. Kindof "dumpsterdiverish". ;O) Anyway, ya I hadn't thought of how big the save file would get saving a bunch of junk. I usually do save guns ans anything that might be a higher ticket item if it is around a 100% repaired so I can sell them for better stuff and rounds. Anyway speaking of playing the game...

This game is very high end. I tried it on my dual core machine, and it crashed a lot. I then gave it a run on the quad core machine with much higher specs, and it is a lot more stable. Still, a number of things can cause it to crash without fail. If you try to 'take all' from something that has a lot of stuff in it, you will invariably crash. Take a few things at a time only. Also, buying stuff from the travelling vendor can trigger a crash. Sometimes its better to just leave them alone.

The NCR story line mission, Ambassador Crocker can go missing and never re-appear. Just quits I guess, and vanishes. This is sort of annoying given you have to report to him again once you have concluded your mission.


It's easy to get stuck in things or to things, so, don't go jumping around piles of rubble or the like, as you may end up caught in them, and have to re-load.

The repeater weapon bug. It works with the Trail Carbine, the Hunting Shotgun and the Cowboy repeater. Basically, either after reloading or when coming out of VATS, these weapons are non-responsive as you are getting your ass kicked by ghouls, scorpions or worse, death claws. After a few seconds, they start working again, but in the non-working phase, you cannot even get back into VATS. The only hope is to run away.

Also, enemies walking through solid objects, scorpions are the worst offenders, they will be under the ground so you can only see their stinger sailing about on the sands like the dorsal fin of a land shark.

I don't want to be hard on the developers, they have spent a lot of time and effort on this game, there is a lot of content. There does need to be a patch which fixes as many of the fundamental flaws as possible.

In terms of inventory management, it might be a good idea to have a 'deck of cards' that you can click on and see what cards you have, rather than keep scrolling scrolling scrolling, keep those doggies scrolling, raw hide...

na pretty much found everything but the alien ship, and still tracking down the evil garden gnome! Those are about the only things i have not finished yet, or helping benny"if you even can", and cezar"i will have to be really bord if I do that part of the end game..." I run around everywhere exploring, doing quest. keep in mind some locations/quest work as triggers for companions to unlock special things/like weapons/skills abilities/allies or things for yourself=)

Here is my experience on the subject.

Game worked perfect for a good while, but then all of a sudden the game crashed (had happened a few time before). When I started up again i couldn't load my last save. Good thing is that i'm taking advantage of the maximum of 1000 saves, so at the time I had about 80 saves, of which the last ~5-7 saves were corrupted. I loaded the last working save, but when saving and then trying to load the new saves they were corrupted aswell. So I did what someone suggested above and dropped all my playing cards (except the deck which can't be dropped). Since then it has worked perfectly again, even though i've had the cards for much longer than the corrupted saves. I've had another random crash since than, but everything is still working. Thanks a bunch for the tip about the bugged cards! :hugs:

Also for those who havn't seen Bethesda's notion on this: