Any longtime fan of Bethesda sandbox games knows this, but if you're a noob it bears repeating.

SAVE YOUR GAME RELIGIOUSLY.

And don't just rely on the quicksave or autosaves either. By all means, use them, but make REGULAR hard saves as well.

Booted up my game tonight after work to find my quicksave had become corrupted somehow. Fortunately, I had a hard save from just 5 minutes earlier, meaning I did NOT have to re-wire the entire Starlight Drive-In control room for a 2nd time, nor did I lose my 150+ hours of gameplay.

You've been warned, SAVE YO GAME LOTS!!

Valuable tip for those not as familiar with Bethesda games. I learned this lesson the hard way a long time ago

I stopped using quick saves in Bethesda games way back in the old Morrowind days. I've made only full saves since 2002. And I save often.

I always wondered what the difference is

Mybye offtopic, but I experienced another problem, I played the game for a while without an internetconnection ( wifi wasn't working ",) lost a lost of saved games and correct saving wasn't possible at all.

I had about 600 saves when the game started bugging. The main menu gave me lots of stuttering, so I decided to rely only on auto saves, I might regret it later but at least I won't have that first problem anymore.

None, really. People who know the game have told me that there is no difference between quick-, auto- and manual saves. They are created the same way, aren't overwritten, and they aren't more susceptible to corruption.

I have played probably close to 10.000 hours of all BGS games combined, and had only one corrupted quicksave in Oblivion years ago. And i seem to remember that was my own fault.

Still, it won't hurt to save often.

I'm on the ps4 & I haven't had any issues with quick saves since I began. However a friend of mine who is also on the ps4 said he had to completely uninstall his game because the quick save feature became completely corrupted. The stuff nightmares are made from.

Difference is that auto saves is automatically overwritten, quick saves are overwritten the next time you press its button.

Hard saves stays.

Pretty much, and good advice to new players to Bethesda games. There were MULTIPLE times when playing Fallout 4 where I encountered wholly game breaking bugs that couldn't be corrected without reverting to an earlier save point. Vital npcs getting stuck, gone missing. Bugs in the dialogue preventing important quests from being completed, you name it. I even had a bug that prevented me from using any door, effectively locking me inside a building.This was actually a case where even an earlier save didn't help me, so I had to make generous use of console commands just to get back outside.

As a Xbox user I had two corrupted save files on this game, both times hard saves, not quick saves. I realised this happened because I would leave the game without going into the game menu and pressing "Quit". Now that I'm doing this all the time when I stop playing, I haven't had another corrupted save.

Just save, wait a few seconds to be sure, go in game menu, then quit, seems to work for me.

Just move out a lot of the older saves to another folder and maybe just keep 10 or so saves. When the saves start to get close to a hundred then do the back up again or just delete some of those saves if a few of them are a few minutes apart.

Yeah that's what I did initially but at that time I had about 10 characters I used to test different builds, since I liked how they all looked like I decided not to delete their saves in case I wanted to use them again, however the savefiles of fallout 4 are not like older beth games this time the savefiles don't really tell you the name of your character, instead you have a bunch of codes and the name of the area where you last saved. So selecting the savefiles was a huge pain in the ass. More annoying than it's worth. I would do what you are suggesting if it wasn't so annoying to do for me.

Side note as a console peasant: thank you Bethesda for introducing quicksave on consoles.

Makes it way easier to manage saves, allowing me to use hard saves for strategic points (begining of quests, questlines, before I build up a settlement, before leaving the game, etc.) and using quicksave for purely short term gameplay reasons. I had so many save files to manage on Skyrim, it was tedious.

At the very least you should always make a new save when entering new areas. I usually have a mixture of fresh saves and auto saves.

Also don't save over old saves - make fresh saves all the time. Seems to reduce bugginess in every way.

I'm doing well with quicksaves. And I'm not a noob. I never had a corrupted save in any Beth game. I only make a hard save when I'm at some decision point that could swing one way or the other.

But if you're on steam, make sure to turn the cloud off. I guess that's one of the major reasons for the saves being corrupted, since the data is loaded back into your system. I always turn it off, since I quite often get the message "failed to synronize" with the cloud. It might be a valid feature if you're playing on multiple computers, but if you're using only one, it's just a source for error.

Hard saves ? What are those ?

I save by opening up the console and typing 'save NAME'.

Is this a hard save ? I like to keep my saves named so I know witch one is witch.

Ah, I tried to use SaveGame NAME to save a specific point (pre-final choice that alienates a faction, ie a point of no return)... and it did not give an error, but it did not actually save the game, either. Now I know why. I'll have to try simply "save NAME"....

I had my save been corrupted untill I started quiting and exiting to the main menu then turning off my console I never had a corrupting save oroblem after that.

A "hard" save is one that won't get overwritten unless you want it to be. Autosaves get overwritten constantly as you play, and quicsaves get overwritten every time you quicksave.

Relying on quicksaves can result in the loss of many, many hours of gameplay, even entire playthroughs, if you encounter a corrupt save or game-breaking bug.

Something weird happened in Skyrim. I had a problem with the load times, which I managed to fix by using a different launcher, but I lost a dozen or more saves. Weird thing was that my early and latest saves remained, only the ones in between had disappeared. I started to backup my saves after that.


I've had corrupted saves in FO3, NV and 4. In the first two, the numbering started all over again. Also, the corrupted save's number became something like 4197. I save a lot, but not that much


Some Quick Saves remain. But I think those are saves the game creates at important times.


EDIT:




... Morrowind had quick saves?!


Well, that's information that came 10 years too late.

The number of times I have read threads:

• 'I am in a [stupid] place and I have no saves for [50 hours] / [ever] will a bug fix resolve this?'

The answer is of course:

1. No


2. Save your [censored] game occasionally...

Yep. I always follow it up with manual saving after making progress.

Do save manually before they charge you $$ for saving manually.

I've been told the game deletes the old file before creating a new one with the same name, so practically they have no difference to manual saves. Except of course that they can be replaced automatically by the game.

So safety-wise quick and auto saves are as safe as manual saves.