AaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarghNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

[Johno]

So I was just finishing a mission landing on Minimus. Over 300 science - nothing like what some of you folks manage, but pretty good for me.

Unfortunately I accidentally took too long to drop out of time acceleration, and the big three dug into the atmosphere at 100+. Kaboom.

Annoying, but fixable. I held F12 . . .

And that, children, is when I discovered the difference between quicksave and autosave.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Several months of career, gone, just like that!!!!

[Mister Kerman]

That sucks dude. If I were you I would restart the campaign with your new player experience and do things 10× better! I've never regretted restarting a campaign. KSP is one of those games where the only real obstacles are your own, and self improvement is something you'll never fail to notice.

PS: I read your title in Charlie Brown's moan of frustration.

[Dunbaratu]

So I was just finishing a mission landing on Minimus. Over 300 science - nothing like what some of you folks manage, but pretty good for me.

Unfortunately I accidentally took too long to drop out of time acceleration, and the big three dug into the atmosphere at 100+. Kaboom.

Annoying, but fixable. I held F12 . . .

And that, children, is when I discovered the difference between quicksave and autosave.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Several months of career, gone, just like that!!!!

It's things like this that make me reluctant to go "no-revert" mode. Not all failures are the player's fault because the game has a few buggy behaviors like this one. The timewarp simulation is incorrect when there's atmosphere, and it's supposed to drop you out of time warp at the edge of the atmosphere, but it often doesn't. What happened here is physically impossible - you wouldn't be going that fast that deep into the atmosphere if the game had been calculating atmosphere correctly all the way down to that point - it would have slowed you by then. The reason it didn't calculate it correctly is because it doesn't do it right when under time warp, and for this reason it's supposed to drop out of time warp when atmosphere is encountered, but it often doesn't do it soon enough to avoid its own miscalculations.

This isn't your fault. It's an error that exists purely in the game's simulation. Granted, there is a workaround, which is "don't let the game drop you out of timewarp itself - do it yourself before you get close" - but the existence of a workaround for a game bug does not transfer the blame for the bug from the game to the player. It's still the game's fault, first and foremost.

[Xyrus]

It's things like this that make me reluctant to go "no-revert" mode. Not all failures are the player's fault because the game has a few buggy behaviors like this one. The timewarp simulation is incorrect when there's atmosphere, and it's supposed to drop you out of time warp at the edge of the atmosphere, but it often doesn't. What happened here is physically impossible - you wouldn't be going that fast that deep into the atmosphere if the game had been calculating atmosphere correctly all the way down to that point - it would have slowed you by then. The reason it didn't calculate it correctly is because it doesn't do it right when under time warp, and for this reason it's supposed to drop out of time warp when atmosphere is encountered, but it often doesn't do it soon enough to avoid its own miscalculations.

This isn't your fault. It's an error that exists purely in the game's simulation. Granted, there is a workaround, which is "don't let the game drop you out of timewarp itself - do it yourself before you get close" - but the existence of a workaround for a game bug does not transfer the blame for the bug from the game to the player. It's still the game's fault, first and foremost.

One of my long standing rules is that if something happens as a result of a game bug, then I am free to revert. Mysterious Kraken attacks(WTH?), colliding with VAB while in orbit(WTH??), spontaneous instant overheats(WTH???), quantum teleportation into the sun (only happened once and still don't what the hell happened there), etc.

[Superfluous J]

I may be dense, but what does holding F12 do?

Or did you mean you held F9, and then found out you hadn't quicksaved, assuming that each autosave was a new quicksave?

[Endersmens]

I may be dense, but what does holding F12 do?

Or did you mean you held F9, and then found out you hadn't quicksaved, assuming that each autosave was a new quicksave?

That's what he meant. I've done that too. Botched a landing and held f9 hoping for the best, and losing 2-3 entire tech nodes worth of progress. It is beyond frustrating.

[Gaarst]

Doesn't Alt+F9 allow you to load autosaves ?

[Guest]

Yeah, I know that problem. During my first KSP runs ever I tried through all the buttons. Reading "Hold F9 to reload last quicksave" I somehow assumed I would quicksave by pressing F9. A few (successfull) weeks later, I did a mun mission, pressed F9 before landing and when the lading went wrong, I held F9. Well... I then went into internet and learned this page by heart.

[Superfluous J]

Doesn't Alt+F9 allow you to load autosaves ?

Technically it can, but autosaves are just writing to the persistent.sfs file so that's all you can load.

Actually, if the OP had IMMEDIATELY just closed KSP (like with alt-F4) he'd have had a moderate chance of reloading it before re-entry started with no other action.

Also, OP, if you use KAC it may make backups of your game state at every point you used it to "jump to ship." I've been saved by that a couple times.

[Streetwind]

The thing that "kills saves" here is that loading a quicksave overwrites your persistent.sfs with that state. Immediately.

I made that mistake once. I accidentally loaded a quicksave that was two weeks of gameplay old. Didn't even mean to do that. Boom, all that progress gone, unrecoverable. It doesn't matter how quickly you react, the moment you load the quicksave, your persistent.sfs is reset to that state.

I was so bummed out, I never resumed playing that save. It was my 1.1 save too, and just on the cusp of breaking into the modded parts of the Community Tech Tree -.-

From now on, I will make a point of deselecting the ability to quicksave/quickload regardless of what difficulty I plan to play on. It's a save-killer.

[Mister Kerman]

I make a pre-mission save at the KSC pause menu . (As well as every time I quit the game.) It can be a little more complicated if you're doing a large number of missions at once, but multiple saves can save your bum.

Edited September 20, 2015 by Mister Kerman

[Columbia]

The thing that "kills saves" here is that loading a quicksave overwrites your persistent.sfs with that state. Immediately.

I made that mistake once. I accidentally loaded a quicksave that was two weeks of gameplay old. Didn't even mean to do that. Boom, all that progress gone, unrecoverable. It doesn't matter how quickly you react, the moment you load the quicksave, your persistent.sfs is reset to that state.

I was so bummed out, I never resumed playing that save. It was my 1.1 save too, and just on the cusp of breaking into the modded parts of the Community Tech Tree -.-

From now on, I will make a point of deselecting the ability to quicksave/quickload regardless of what difficulty I plan to play on. It's a save-killer.

Oh my god, I hate that. So. Damn. Much.

[peachoftree]

You can do Mod+F5 to name quicksaves, so you can have more than one.

[T-Bouw]

So ironically, impatience has led to having to need even more patience...

It's a lesson I also have learned the hard way in KSP.

You'll get over it and become a better player because of it.

[cantab]

You're not the first, and until Squad change things you won't be the last. And KSP isn't the only game to give you rope to hang yourself like this.

To stop it happening again the protection is the same as against any other data loss: backups. It doesn't matter how you do it, it's a good idea to have all your game saves routinely backed up. (I use Spideroak, it's secure, powerful, and cross-platform but it can suffer from performance issues on first installations.)

[Clipperride]

After suffering a similar fate early in my KSP playing, I've become a little obsessive about saves. When I leave the game I alternately save as quicksaves #1 and next time #5. I use #4 for stable situations during a flight (having landed or in stable orbit) #3 for fairly safe situations (eg 10,000m to go until landing) and #2 for risky situations (final approach etc). I do tend to revert to one of them if I kill the crew or unintentionally do something stupid like speed up time warp when I meant to revert to 1x. Intentionally stupid things, like trying out a new approach to suicide burns, I alway try with a probe core in control first, before committing a crew. I relax those rules when driving on the Mun as I find it really tricky!

[Superfluous J]

You know what would be cool? A mod like Dmagic13's Sensible Screenshots that - when you hit F5 - saves not only quicksave.sfs (so you can F9 to resume) but also quicksave-yyyy-mm-dd--hh-mm-ss.sfs (so you have a full archive of all the times you thought something important enough was going to happen that you wanted a save).

[regex]

You know what would be cool? A mod like Dmagic13's Sensible Screenshots that - when you hit F5 - saves not only quicksave.sfs (so you can F9 to resume) but also quicksave-yyyy-mm-dd--hh-mm-ss.sfs (so you have a full archive of all the times you thought something important enough was going to happen that you wanted a save).

Too bad the devs seem to have an unnatural aversion to timestamps anywhere it might be useful to the player (and not the dev).

[Whizzkid]

Here's a tip: if you use windows 8+, add your ksp save folder to a library, then enable file history to backup changes to an external HDD or NAS drive every 10 minutes, so losses should be minimal. It has been a lifesaver for me in the past where a craft file becomes corrupted or you restore the wrong quicksave and lose progress. If it happens, simply close the game and use file history to restore the most recent non-affected backup of the file, then restart KSP.

[cantab]

You know what would be cool? A mod like Dmagic13's Sensible Screenshots that - when you hit F5 - saves not only quicksave.sfs (so you can F9 to resume) but also quicksave-yyyy-mm-dd--hh-mm-ss.sfs (so you have a full archive of all the times you thought something important enough was going to happen that you wanted a save).

That would be of no help in the OP's situation, of expecting F9 to reload the last autosave, nor the common related situation of quickloading without realising how long ago you quicksaved.

[Superfluous J]

That would be of no help in the OP's situation, of expecting F9 to reload the last autosave, nor the common related situation of quickloading without realising how long ago you quicksaved.

True, but it would still be awesome.

Nothing will save people from screwing themselves over, except hijacking autosaving and turning into quicksaving - that also autosaves - and also saves iterative dated backups.

Which would also be awesome.

[KSACheese]

I feel your pain. I did that once, and rage quit for a while after I realized what I had just done.

[FyunchClick]

You can do Mod+F5 to name quicksaves, so you can have more than one.

Yeah, that and regular copies of your save dir, it's not that hard to find.

I once lost a two month career when the persistence went corrupt on a game crash and I didn't realize that confirming to remove the corrupt save meant it would remove all saves under that profile, not just the corrupt persistence. That won't happen again.

Just remember what Al says...

[ThatGuyWithALongUsername]

This happened on one of my first mun landing attempts... It was also my first ragequit...

[MartGonzo]

My sympathies, I've done the same a couple of times.

but consider it a hard learned lesson.

named saves from the Space Center every once in a while is the way to go and quicksaves for just before trying something risky on mission, which in my case is most things.