Sundaygloom

So I finally unlocked all the parts in my career mode. It took a bit of time, progress slowed down quite a bit towards the end. Some stats from my career. It took me 44 kerbal years. 122 completed missions. The only kerbal I lost was Jeb, I lost him fairly early in, I relied on quicksaves after that so I wouldn't lose anyone else. I primarily used Valentina. Tester and Valbus were my backups, they ran some simultaneous mission while Valentina was busy on hers. Bill was my chief engineer, Samble was the backup. Bob and Nacan were my lead scientists, but they've been orbiting planets and moons for years running science experiments. I need to get them back eventually. I currently have 10 million in the bank, thanks a lot to mapping asteroids, easy missions that are cheap to run but payout a lot. That gave me some leeway in building some more expensive rockets. My most expensive rocket was just under 500,000, that was putting an orbital base capable of landing on minmus, mining 6000 ore and going back to orbit with it, it could support 16 kerbal, it was one of my more better looking stations, I spent a lot of time designing it, although it pales in comparison to the stuff I see other people building. My average was between 150-200,000 for most of my missions I didn't do a lot of landing, pretty much only duna and several moons. I was more focused on running missions and getting science and I didn't get many missions to land. All missions were stock. I still have tons to accomplish but I might move over to sandbox mode now for that. I've yet to build anything in the spaceplane hanger. I'm still getting missions that challenge to do new stuff like put an asteroid into orbit which I haven't attempted yet so I might stick around career for awhile. Thanks again for the mod recommendations as well, ker and alarm clock were a big help. I never used mech Jeb, I tried once and couldn't figure it out. And all the visual stuff was a nice addition. I didn't know about any precision node mod so the last update was a nice addition for me. Being able to fine tune and move the maneuver node made things a lot easier.

Thanks, I added stock visual enhancements. It was fine at first but does cause a small performance hit with larger ships. Not to bad though but I might have to scale some stuff back when I start making stuff with more parts. I haven't been doing any planet hopping lately. Mostly focusing on learning the mining mechanics which I think I have down now. Been experimenting with the different engines as well and trying to build a surface base on mun. Theirs been a lot of failures and dumb oversights. But it's all part of the fun.

I'm not ready for eve yet. It took me five attempts to do duna. I'm trying to keep the cost down to since I'm in career mode. I don't want to blow my whole budget on one rocket. I think the ship to duna was about 120,000 which I don't think was too bad.

Another quick update. Progress is going a bit slower now. I've landed on and returned from duna. In fact I've been to duna about 8 times now. I think I have that down. I've learned quite a bit on getting to planets, getting the timing down, trajectories and all of that. Alarm clock is helping quite a bit now. I've done a bit of docking and rendezvous, but I definitely need some more practice on that. I can do it but it still not easy for me yet. I have docked without needing to refer back and forth to online tutorials so that was nice. But it took a lot of mistakes before I finally got it done. I feel like I've learned a lot in the last couple of weeks but I have a long ways to go. But I'm getting there. I'm eager to jump into sandbox and just start creating interesting stuff but I want to learn all the basics first. I'm almost done in career mode as far as unlocking all the parts and upgrading the base. I have 2 more 550 and the last 4 1000 slots to unlock. Sometime I just skip the missions and just go to planets to get more science. But I like the missions because it forces me to do stuff I'm uncomfortable doing and In the process learn more. I also added the restock and restock plus mods which are pretty cool. I like the way it looks. I want to add some clouds and other effects but I also don't want to bog the game down to much with stuff like that. I haven't run into any performance issues yet but I know when you get to building really large things it can be taxing on the system.

So I've been using engineer redux (very helpful) and alarm clock (only just got around to using it) so far. I've been slowly working my way through the career, I might try the exploration pack as the regular contracts are getting a bit stale. I've made some good progress, maximizing my science as much as possible, Im almost to the last section of the tree. But trying to collect samples from every biome gets a bit tedious. I've orbited duna with a 7 kerbal crew and safely returned, that's my farthest achievement so far. I've watched a few YouTubers as well, some guy named Matt lowne has a pretty good series that I'm enjoying, it's helped me quite a bit and he's still producing regular content. A lot of other videos are years old so it's cool to see people still making new stuff. Anyways, just thought I'd send an update on my progress. Thanks again for the suggestions

thanks for the replies, ill definitely check out the suggestions. my playtime is sporadic, but ill be around. i try to get on every night and put a couple hours in. its been so long since when i played on ps4, i forgot a lot of stuff, so im relearning a bunch now. back when i was on ps4 i watched a lot of tutorials, i might have to revisit some of those.

Just wanted to say hello and introduce myself. i just recently got back into kerbal. i put about 80 hours into the ps4 version a couple of years ago. im still very much a beginner, i managed to do most of the basic beginning stuff, i got fairly far in the career mode, never landed on another planet though, just did a fly by and orbit of one. i think i was doing some beginner space station stuff as well at the time, i remember trying to learn docking, my plan was always to eventually move over to the pc version. so i bought the game again on pc about a year ago but only just recently started getting back into it as i know its going to absorb a lot of my time, i spend a lot of time sim racing but wanted something else to sink my teeth into. hopefully i can really get into it this time and learn a lot from the veterans around here. are there any must have mods for starting out, i have mech jeb but thats all right now. maybe some visual enhancements that are popular or anything like that, ive glanced through the mod section but it seems like a lot to sort through and geared towards people who've been using this game for awhile. im not really interested in new parts and new mission stuff right now as i think whats available will keep me busy for awhile.

Thanks for the reply. I do have two USB drives laying around. I'll start to rotate my saves just in case. I've been pretty lucky with crashes so far compared to what I hear from other people, just good to know I have backups just in case.

Does backing up the save to a USB work? I had a crash like this early in my game, so I've been backing my save up just in case, I haven't tried to reload it yet since I haven't had a crash since, so I can't confirm that it'll work but I don't see why not. I'm about 20 hours in now. I'm hoping this is a temporary solution for now so I don't have to worry about losing so many hours of progress.

I had this happen twice. Once was during the orbit the mun training mission. I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out if I did something wrong or if I clicked something I shouldn't have. I backed out and started it again and it still persisted, I had to reload the game and then it was fine.

The corrupted save file doesn't make me want to continue either. I was 20 hours in playing on science mode. Went to recover my ship and the game crashed corrupting the save file, the same as you. I really like the game, but it's unplayable at the moment if I'm constantly worrying about losing my save.