What exactly is saved in the saves?

[LordHelmchen]

Greetings.

I'm almost finished handcrafting a compytibility patch (while FO3Edit's merged patch, Wrye Flash's bashed patch and Remastered all have their merrits, in the end I still felt the need to use my own brain... though all three helped a lot in understanding what might be the right solution), and now I'm wondering:

What is saved when one saves the game, or rather: will loading a saved game load potentially obsolete item/npc/etc stats or will the save tell the engine to look up the item/npc/etc which whill then find the new, properly merged properties ?

 

tl;dr: will my saved game necessarily be broken after I repaired mod conflicts manually ?

Edited November 10, 2011 by LordHelmchen

[Jeoshua]

Everything in the save file is by FormID.

 

Basically, a ".fos" file is an ".esp" file, with a header that specifies which mods were loaded when running the game. All FormIDs found in the file point to the file at a specific place in the header of the save, meaning that if you change load orders the link stays valid.

 

If you remove a FormID from your mods, and the save file references it, it may cause crashes. If you remove the mod itself, Fallout will delete those references from the loaded data of the save when you try to load it into memory.

 

For this reason, it's usually suggested, after a major version update of a mod, to disable it entirely, load the save without it, resave, then turn the mod back on before loading the newly "cleaned" save. It's not usually necessary with small changes, but generally helps to make sure nothing was halfway through a script and then the rules change, leading to out-of-bounds errors and the like.

 

If you ADD a file to the mix, it will modify all data underneath it. The save file is considered to be "on top", so in general it will affect "new" instances of object, and not always the top instance. This isn't always the case, however. For example: if you change which repair list an object uses, it will not be updated in the weapon your have in your character's inventory. If, on the other hand, you change what is IN the repair list, when the game loads the object it will be pointing to the newly changed repair list, which is not stored in the save file.

Edited November 12, 2011 by Jeoshua