How big is your save, and is it stable?

[jazzak25]

I'm ready to start a new game, with all the DLCs and a hundred mods about. I've been careful enough to test them all and there is very little use now in the papyrus log, thanks in big part to unofficial patches.

 

My aim is to try and get through the whole game, including DLCs with relative performance ease. I keep hearing about save game bloat and am wondering how big does a save have to get before it starts to become unstable. Be good to hear how many megs people are up to in theirs and even more so if they have no problems, eg CTDs, freezing, etc.

[SineWaveDrox]

The largest save I'm playing on right now is about 12MB, and still fairly stable. Based on my playing over the last couple of days, I've been getting aprox. 1 crash every 2 or so hours. Not too bad considering what I've had to deal with before. Largest file I've ever had was 17MB. That one was horribly unstable, but that was mostly due, I think, to the hundreds of mods I was using, and hundreds more that had been installed at some point, and uninstalled later, along with having the GridsToLoad set at 9. I've heard of people having perfectly stable saves with sizes up to 24MB, but I don't know what the average value is for people to get a crash-prone game.

[Belial666]

I got a 13.6M save after 260 hours with no issues.I got hearthfire,dawnguard,the highres packs,and the unofficial patches.I tihnk the issue is something else,maybe drives need defragging more,or something else in background running hidden(disk optimizer,live av/spyware,etc),piece of hardware slowly going bad.I can see CTD or slow loading could be blamed on save loading,but I dunno if playing can be.It could just be I'm on a XP 32bit,so a 32bit game is stable on it.

[jazzak25]

Yeah I was tempted to set GridsToLoad higher than usual, but brought it back to 5 from 7 and at five it is completely stable, running averagely on 45fps.

 

I'm surprised that's all it is, my first save after loading all mods sits at 4.5 meg, that's with SKSE, enb and perhaps about 8 script heavy mods, though none that conflict. I hope it progresses slowly, I heard too that quicksave is not a good option to save games, but I can't remember why, and hope it's not true as it's incredibly convenient. 260 hours at 14 meg would do me fine I think.

[ilikecheese1337]

My saves are currently around 10-16 MB, depending on the save - the 6MB increase happened somewhere between Dawnguard and Dragonborn, but I've no idea where exactly. Either way, they're both stable, but to ensure safety I'm replaying the DLCs from the 10MB save before the increase.

Edited February 15, 2013 by ilikecheese1337

[Shubal]

I've gotten the impression but never a confirmation, that opening consol and typing" PCB" then enter, close console and save is a useful practise to keep clutter out of saves. Is that so?

[Glion]

14635 kb is my current size

[WatchMeGoing]

My largest save is 13.3 MB and perfectly stable.

[SineWaveDrox]

I've gotten the impression but never a confirmation, that opening consol and typing" PCB" then enter, close console and save is a useful practise to keep clutter out of saves. Is that so?

 

I don't know if PCB reduces save-game bloat, but the command is helpful if you're using several texture packs and notice constant CTDs due to RAM limitations of the game.

[jazzak25]

I started a new game with all DLCs and all Unofficial Patches only, when I leave Helgen Keep my save is already up to 4.7meg. Considering i'm the kind of guy who needs to complete everything, the journey ahead will be over 200 hours. Don't know if that's a normal amount of meg to have at this point, but it's been stripped down to these bare essentials. Here's hoping.