Detect Corrupted Saves

[Fyuumi]

So I've been playing Fallout 4 for a relatively short time compared to everyone else, and found a selection of mods I'm happy with. So after installing them I made a new character and about four hours in got a ctd whenever I tried to go to a specific location which surprised me because I never had a single ctd before then (excepting one improperly installed mod) even though I played much longer on many other characters. It turned out my saves were corrupt and I lost three hours of progress. So my question, since google searches won't find mention of anything like this anywhere, is this:

 

I'm fairly certain there's no way to repair corrupted saves using a program or the console, and I can't find any way to reliably prevent it from ever happening. But is there at least some way to look at a save file and tell if it's corrupt or not, maybe with some program an intelligent and proactive programmer made and put online? I'm okay with maybe losing a couple of hours of progress every once in a while, but I don't want to be days into a game and go to an area to find out my saves are corrupted and have been for over a day's worth of playing time.

 

So are there any useful or helpful ways to deal with corrupt saves at all?

[NorthWolf]

Two things:

 

1. I wouldn't assume that there's no way to repair a "corrupt" save provided you can load the save. At that point the real question is figuring out what causes the problem. If deactivating all your mods suddenly enables you to enter that area then you know the source is a mod. Selectively enable mods until the game breaks again. Then you have the answer as to what's wrecking your game. If it's a problem that only exists in that one area regardless of mods then you might be able to fix the save by figuring out what specifically in that area is causing your crash, possibly by selectively disabling assets. That's not as easy...

 

The problem usually comes down to this: if you have a modest amount of experience with using the console to hack up your game you can often manage this purely on intuition, especially if you have some experience modifying Bethesda games. Otherwise you're often times stuck trying to find out through FAQs and other sources what the possible problem is. So this may or may not really help you -- sometimes it take take two or three hours to figure out the problem, which is bad enough that it's just better at that point to start the game again when you're only two or three hours in. Sometimes you never figure it out. Whether or not taking the time investment to fix your save through the console is worth it is entirely a matter of personal opinion.

 

2. Due to the very nature of the game it's basically impossible to do what you're suggesting. Your save game does not hold the entire world. Your save game is more like a record of the changes you've made to the world. What you're asking for is something to detect a broken ESM/ESP or a broken combination of ESM/ESP files, something that Bethesda would no doubt implement if it was possible to do so in a reasonable fashion. But there's a reason Bethesda games are kind of notoriously buggy: there are just way too many potential interactions to predict what's going to break and what isn't. And when it is possible to predict what's going to break it's much better to, y'know... just patch out the problem in the first place. So someone might be able to do this in a trivial way, i.e. checking if a handful of known, common problems exist for your game, but it would be hard to do it in a meaningful way.

 

TL;DR: Sometimes you can save your game using the console if your problem is common enough or you know enough about using the console to try to figure out the source of the problem on your own. Disabling/enabling mods might also save you from problems. The actual request you're making, however, is significantly more complicated than your realize and de facto impossible due to the nature of games like Fallout 4.