For anyone that played long enough to experience the save file size CTD, have you been able to play long enough to get your file size back into your "Deathzone"?

I picked back up with my 70's level character that had a save file size of approx 16.0 mb. The 1.4 patch immediately dropped my save file size to about 14.0 mb. With this same character if I played long enough I would get my save game files to 16.8 to 17.0 mb and I would get repeatable CTD's at certian locations. I have not been able to get my new (post 1.4) saves up into this "deathzone" since the 1.4 release. Saves seem to be growing quite a bit slower than before the patch.

Has anyone out there been able to get their saves up to the size that would previously cause CTD's, yet they can now play without this CTD issue? All in all 1.4 seems to be a great update but still Beth is extremely tight lipped about this issue. My fear is that I put another 150 hours into this character, on top of the 400 I already have, and the CTD issue will just return.

My last (most broken) save before 1.4 was about 17 MB. 1.4 reduced this to about 16 MB. After playing for over 75 hours on 1.4, my most recent save is about 18 MB. ABSOLUTELY NONE of the associated CTDs have occurred.

The issue was never directly linked to save file size but rather to the "junk" data in it. Version 1.4 clearly introduced cleanup code that removes enough of this junk to prevent it being an issue.

IMO this issue was fixed by the 1.4 update, despite any paranoia about it.

Agreed! Prior to this patch my game was unplayable due to the CTD issue. My save file is now over 20 MB and I have no CTD issues with 1.4 patch.

After the initial save file size reduction, the file continues to grow albeit much more slowly. The CTD issue seems to be fixed for now but one wonders if the problem has gone away or simply put off. Time will tell.

Well, my game was totally unplayable before 1.4. I had over a dozen quests ongoing but any attempt to progress in any of them caused 100% CTD. Continuing from that "broken" save, I have been playing version 1.4 for 80 hours and none of the previous CTDs have occurred. I'd say it's fixed.

Thanks for commenting.

I have not been able to play long enough to get my save files up into my "deathzone". It is clearly climbing at a much slower pace than before. I am thrilled to hear that at least a couple of players have been able to surpass their previous problem file size and continue to play without issue. I do realize that "file size" was not the real factor for this problem, but that seemed to be the only way to quantify the issue for so many players. I would have wished that Beth would have at least said a sentence or two about the issue so we could have spoke about more accurately, but still no words on the topic.

This is a shame because they should really take a bow here. This patch "probably" definitively corrected a major issue that rendered the game basically unplayable for many people. God knows they take a hammering for bugs but people must look at the complexity of this type of game. A billion things can go wrong and that is only the things you know about. There is probably a billion more you dont know about.

I've constantly played with one character from day one launch (approx 665 hours), my 25.5 MB savegame was rendered completely unplayable due to the excessive bloat, causing CTDs every few minutes. After updating to 1.4 my savegame file has dropped to around 23.8 MB and now the game is completely stable and crash free.

Looking through my recent savegame files (as I have them all backed up), it appears that there is a noticible growth over time and then a sudden reduction in size between saves. I guess the 'empty garbage' script is working well now

Hurrah!

Same here. My game was unplayable and now it's fine. I've played one of my previously broken saves over 15 hours on 1.4 with no issues of note.

As an aside, I personally doubt it was ever the absolute size of the files that was the issue but rather something like when there was too much stuff some fixed size allocation would overrun its boundaries or some issue with garbage collection would get triggered. Maybe they fixed their memory management so they can now handle arbitrarily large saves (subject to available system memory), and they clearly messed with save file garbage collection mechanism. It could very well be that size doesn't matter anymore. Here's hoping!

I think they changed the save formar to a more efficient way and the way cells are loaded to a one more taxing but more forgiving in the case of corruption (it seems that earlier, things like a repeated ID or an unfinded resource caused a crash while now they could be ignored).

My bet is that as now this game will behave as previous ones with size growing. It will decrease stability and performance but not to the point of having repeatable CTDs in well known cells or having a noticeable stuttering without using mods. Which was the case until now.

No CTD's or even a TESV has stopped responding since patch 1.4 went live.