Computer Crash

[averious]

Not really sure if this was caused by URW, but I was playing and in the middle of tanning a hide when my laptop blue screened. Restarted my PC and the save file is corrupted; when loading a character the name is blank and when I select it the game says it cannot migrate character as it comes from a version before 3.17. Figure I'll post the character folder so you can take a look in case it was caused by URW. I was using Buoidda's mod and the Njerpez Cooking mod: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6n76rzomx1h9hfk/JAKKO.rar?dl=0

[PALU]

Unfortunately, UrW isn't very resilient to crashes. While UrW crashing usually doesn't corrupt the save, it happens sometimes, and the issue may very well be worse with the computer crashing due to cashed disk writes.
Make regular backups so you can go back when the save gets corrupted (I tend to copy the save at the end of every play session: it's easy to delete the backups in bulk when there's a lot of them cluttering the screen).

[averious]

It's funny, in the past three years of playing this game, I've always made a backup folder for characters. The one time I don't I get the BSOD.

[Sami]

Hmm. The blue screen of death sounds more like a Windows crash rather than an application crash -- and the game crashing shouldn't nevertheless wipe out any character data.
However, this kind of character data blanking is something we've heard of couple of times at the (old) forums. It's a mystery to me as well, and sounds like disk write, or file access  problem.  See, the character data is saved upon every map load - if a crash, power out or whatever then occurs the character data should be safe & sound on your disk.
What could interfere here is if there's some sort (Windows) cache working in the background, and the data isn't actually saved to disk but cached into memory for later disk saving. Then a crash before cache flush might result in something bad. The same might happen if game files are open somewhere (editor, etc.) and disk access is set forbidden by Windows.

All in all, things getting blank like this is extremely odd to me too. I'll see about possibilities of restoring the character and will let you know.

[Sami]

Checked the savegame out, but it's unfortunately unrecoverable. All blank character file.

msglog says the last action was cleaning, not tanning, the skin.
Then there are couple blank lines which indicates that writing to msglog has also failed.

[Darkwolf Jr]

Sorry to bring up an old post but...

Thanks to a power outage one of my saves was also (Blanked?)
Well I put a lot of work in it and I don't want to lose it and my last backup was 3 days ago still a lot of work gone but I had an idea.
Why not replace the corrupted files in the bad save with the good ones from the old backup so far its working but there is an issue.
Some of the items I left on the ground at my settlement are corrupted they look like swords with no name If I knew what file ground items are stored in i might could salvage them too.

Also think I disabled that windows caching so maybe it won't happen again.

[PALU]

I'd rather lose 3 days than risk playing with a corrupted save. Mixing and matching sounds rather dangerous. I'd recommend making a save backup after every game session, though.

[Darkwolf Jr]

In this case a loss of 3 days is abut the same as a total loss. Save corruption is something I have had to deal with in many other games. Sometimes I can patch them up and they work fine other times they don't but it never hurts to try to fix them.

Also I don't like to backup URW saves too much because it can be used to bypass the permanent death. Yes I see the irony its okay to be killed by a bear but not a windows bug lol.

[Silenia]

[...]
Also I don't like to backup URW saves too much because it can be used to bypass the permanent death. Yes I see the irony its okay to be killed by a bear but not a windows bug lol.

Nah, makes perfect sense to me. One is something that is actually in-character and quite possibly influenced by your (character)'s choices. The other, well, isn't.

Kind of the same way I didn't like being killed by a Njerpez several characters back but accepted it without save-scumming myself back to life, whereas the time I got killed by robbers because I meant to Shift-X (switch which hand the weapon's in) and pressed Shift-Z dropping to sleep in the middle of combat I probably would've bypassed if I had had a back-up. Because no, Iza Kaumolainen didn't actually decide to sleep and thus get butchered, I just hadn't properly gotten used to my new keyboard. One's an immersive in-game thing, the other is not.

[PALU]

I agree with Silenia.

I've save scummed when fat fingering has caused me to light a fire inside my cabin rather than get stuff, and I've also save scummed when my dog drowns while I circle a single tile lake inside my trap fence which, in my view, is a buggy behavior (but I try to avoid it happening by leashing the dog when there's weak ice about).
I know backup saves provide a temptation to save scum to undo stupid decisions, but to me the crucial difference is whether you want to save scum due to a bug/accidental key press that should never happen in reality, or whether it was a stupid decision/bad in game luck (like my last character's death: poor judgement followed by very bad luck, hopefully leading to slightly better judgement for future characters).

Ultimately, though, you play the way you want to play, and use save scumming the way you want to, tempered with your knowledge of how good/bad you are at resisting temptations.

UrW is written to be played without save scumming, but it's also written to be played without crashing. Crashes happen, so backup saving is an appropriate counter measure.

[PALU]

Ninja? Card info? Are you sure you're posting in the forum for the right game?

As far as I know, UrW can be gotten either from Steam, which should support installation on a new computer, or via a download from the development home page (optionally associated with a donation). I'm not aware of any card information in those processes (unless you've created a new Steam account, in which case the answer is yes; things licensed on one account has no bearing on other accounts).