Is it ever safe to make saves outside of the pause menu?

[Project579]

Remove the memory patch from skse it's better.

[PresidentDylan5]

Alright thanks I'll try that. About your mod list btw, why do you put combat evolved after your bashed patch in the load order?

[cdcooley]

Apparently autosaves and quicksaves (and maybe just saving outside the pause menu) cause scripts to become desynced, a bigger problem with script heavy builds, which can cause problems over time.

The game's own autosave and quicksave features are perfectly safe. There is only one save mechanism built into the game and no matter how or when it gets triggered the game is paused, the scripting engine activity is frozen, and then after the save things are returned to normal. (That fact has been confirmed by the SKSE team who looked at the code in detail while making the SKSE co-save system.) There's nothing special about the "Pause" menu. It's the same menu where SkyUI's MCM is implemented and it definitely does not pause the scripting system because if it did no MCM menus would work. It does put the game in "menu mode" which limits some of the world activity but that has nothing to do with the scripting system.

 

There are two long standing myths about autosaves (and quicksaves). One is that they cause game crashes and the other is that the result in corrupted save files. Both are simply myths.

 

At some point someone noticed that crashes frequently happen right after the autosave message and used very flawed reasoning to blame the autosaves for the crashes. Bethesda created autosaves and set them to run just before the points where game crashes are most likely to happen. If autosaves were really causing crashes those same saves would be unusable after you restart the game but that is almost never the case.

 

It is true that if you're running the game at the very edge of its limits then the extra overhead of doing an autosave before a cell load is more likely to cause a crash during the load than if autosaves were turned off. But that's just a case of delaying the inevitable. Without the autosave you'll still get a crash but it will be a little later. And since you didn't make the autosave that just means you played the game for longer and have lost more progress. So ultimately all that avoiding autosaves does for you is to make crashes slightly less frequent but more costly when they do happen.

 

Save game corruption being caused by autosaves (or quicksave) is the other myth. Game corruption occurs when you reload a game over an already existing game. That can be through quickload, the auto-reload on death, or by using the "quit to main menu" then loading another save. In all of those cases you're merging the data from a saved game into the one you were already playing. It's the data from two different game sessions being merged together that results in corruption. Some of that corruption then gets permanently stored the next time you make a save but it doesn't matter if it was an autosave, a quicksave, or a manual save.

 

Assuming you have autosaves turned on the automatic reload on death rarely causes a problem because you're almost always reloading from a save that's just a few minutes old and probably made in the same cell. Use of quicksave and quickload is also relatively safe if you use them to save right before trying something that you know might fail. But when people go back and load saves made many hours earlier the state of the existing and new/old game can be very different and those differences become corruption. The absolutely worst case is when someone loads a save from an entirely different character. That can lead to all sorts of really strange results because now things from two entirely different characters have been merged together into the game's memory.

 

So if you're really concerned about crashes, leave autosave turned on. It's there to prevent you from losing progress when then inevitable crash does happen.

 

If you are worried about savegame corruption, avoid quickload and always quit to desktop and completely restart the game before loading any save. If you're truly paranoid, quit the game if you die instead of letting it auto-reload your last save.

[Project579]

 

Apparently autosaves and quicksaves (and maybe just saving outside the pause menu) cause scripts to become desynced, a bigger problem with script heavy builds, which can cause problems over time.

The game's own autosave and quicksave features are perfectly safe. There is only one save mechanism built into the game and no matter how or when it gets triggered the game is paused, the scripting engine activity is frozen, and then after the save things are returned to normal. (That fact has been confirmed by the SKSE team who looked at the code in detail while making the SKSE co-save system.) There's nothing special about the "Pause" menu. It's the same menu where SkyUI's MCM is implemented and it definitely does not pause the scripting system because if it did no MCM menus would work. It does put the game in "menu mode" which limits some of the world activity but that has nothing to do with the scripting system.

 

There are two long standing myths about autosaves (and quicksaves). One is that they cause game crashes and the other is that the result in corrupted save files. Both are simply myths.

 

At some point someone noticed that crashes frequently happen right after the autosave message and used very flawed reasoning to blame the autosaves for the crashes. Bethesda created autosaves and set them to run just before the points where game crashes are most likely to happen. If autosaves were really causing crashes those same saves would be unusable after you restart the game but that is almost never the case.

 

It is true that if you're running the game at the very edge of its limits then the extra overhead of doing an autosave before a cell load is more likely to cause a crash during the load than if autosaves were turned off. But that's just a case of delaying the inevitable. Without the autosave you'll still get a crash but it will be a little later. And since you didn't make the autosave that just means you played the game for longer and have lost more progress. So ultimately all that avoiding autosaves does for you is to make crashes slightly less frequent but more costly when they do happen.

 

Save game corruption being caused by autosaves (or quicksave) is the other myth. Game corruption occurs when you reload a game over an already existing game. That can be through quickload, the auto-reload on death, or by using the "quit to main menu" then loading another save. In all of those cases you're merging the data from a saved game into the one you were already playing. It's the data from two different game sessions being merged together that results in corruption. Some of that corruption then gets permanently stored the next time you make a save but it doesn't matter if it was an autosave, a quicksave, or a manual save.

 

Assuming you have autosaves turned on the automatic reload on death rarely causes a problem because you're almost always reloading from a save that's just a few minutes old and probably made in the same cell. Use of quicksave and quickload is also relatively safe if you use them to save right before trying something that you know might fail. But when people go back and load saves made many hours earlier the state of the existing and new/old game can be very different and those differences become corruption. The absolutely worst case is when someone loads a save from an entirely different character. That can lead to all sorts of really strange results because now things from two entirely different characters have been merged together into the game's memory.

 

So if you're really concerned about crashes, leave autosave turned on. It's there to prevent you from losing progress when then inevitable crash does happen.

 

If you are worried about savegame corruption, avoid quickload and always quit to desktop and completely restart the game before loading any save. If you're truly paranoid, quit the game if you die instead of letting it auto-reload your last save.

 

My Skyrim saves never got corrupted in any way not even by removing script heavy mods so i never worried to much about them i use a save manager so that it saves when i leave combat.

[PresidentDylan5]

Right thanks for the info cooley I feel a bit better about saving now, I'll make sure to load a save mid session unless it's very recent.