Basic Info:
Platform: PlayStation 5
Issue Type: Gameplay
Game Mode: Single Player
Map: Exiled LandsSupplemental to: Camera glitch and subsequent loss of buildings
!!! WARNING !!!
If you don’t want to lose your good game, either have PlayStation Plus subscribed or an USB stick handy!
Once disaster strikes and you have not made a backup beforehand, you are going to end up with a busted game and would have to start constructing your base from scratch again!
Also make sure to disable automatic uploads to the cloud if applicable to prevent the backed-up save from getting trashed!
Bug Description:
Whenever a truly gargantuan base (> estimated 100k pieces, not counting placeables like torches, etc.) is built, eventually a point is reached at which the base vanishes into thin air when exiting the game and attempting to resume. In this case any placeables and thralls are suspended in mid-air where your bases used to be, with some of them vanishing when you are approaching (torches, doors, containers, the latter of which are dropping their contents in that case) and others still remaining (thralls, workbenches, etc.).
The same thing is happening whenever an outpost is established close to the existing base, either connected to it or with little space to it (overlapping regions of land claim?), and your construction is vanishing into thin air once again.
When constructing a base sufficiently far away, however, the newly constructed base and the old one both remain intact and are saved properly. This could be a bit of guesswork, but it looks as if individual bases don’t interfere with one another if the server part can unload the areas in which the other bases are located, and once you exit and restart, every base can be properly restored from the save file.
As for the camera glitch, it obviously isn’t the root cause of the problem as I originally thought, but could be another symptom after the threshold for losing your base has been exceeded by a big margin.
Bug Reproduction:
- Enter a game (either start a new game or use an existing one)
- Start building a gargantuan base
- Exit the game (may take quite an amount of time for this to happen)
- Once a certain threshold of contiguous elements is exceeded, the base vanishes into thin air
4a. This is also happening if another base (either one of your outposts or someone else’s base) is nearby!I recommend that backing up saves for Conan Exiles to the cloud is disabled for this experiment as quitting the game and leaving the PlayStation on standby will have it overwrite the save in the cloud, thus trashing your game!
Another option is backing up the save to an USB stick if it’s still good (i. e. reloads with your base intact) to be able to restore from there if necessary.
Additional Details:
After coming dangerously close to the threshold that causes the base to vanish upon exiting the current game, I first constructed an outpost at a completely different spot on the map (main base at the Place of Summoning, outpost near Klael’s Sanctuary), and after exiting and restarting, I found that both bases had survived. Then I constructed another base really close to my existing gargantuan base, and after exiting and reloading, everything had vanished so I had to restore from the cloud.
Final Considerations:
When pondering this issue (I certainly do not know the actual inner workings of the game, but some educated guesses can be made from the symptoms) the following possible root causes come to mind:
- Memory contention: If too many base elements have to be kept in memory at any one time, the metadata somehow gets corrupted and so cannot be written to the save file. This event is unlikely, though, as the base should get corrupted during active game play in that case.
- Partially unloaded data: In case some parts of the base are considered to be out of range in relation to your character’s position and so get unloaded, it could be an incomplete image of the base that is written to the save file, which upon reloading causes the game to take the data as corrupted and so discards it (also rather unlikely).
- Contention in the Land Claim system: If too many elements are in a given location, for some reason the Land Claim system gets overloaded (in my game I have reduced the radius to 0.25 times its nominal value and told the game to allow constructing everywhere) and so causes the screw-up upon either writing to the save or restoring from it. This seems to be rather likely.
Some of these could also explain why bases are lost on public servers with multiple players (and maybe also multiple factions). Something responsible for managing the game’s metadata obviously screws up, causing data to be lost.
Makes sense ps4 can not be as solid as a online server. Thanks for the tip.
And i discovered that my castle stands…
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand…
I’ve just completed another round of tests.
Whenever you are starting a new base completely detached from your original base, it is generated just fine and doesn’t interfere with your other bases, no matter how close you are coming to your main base.
I’ve first started about 25 squares (that is, squares with a size of a foundation) away, placed 25 elements, left the game and reloaded. Both bases have been properly saved.
Next time I started about six squares away from my main base and again placed 25 elements. Rinse and repeat, same result: Everything was there just fine.
Then I started about one(!) square away from my main base and again placed several elements that overlapped slightly at one spot. Rinse and repeat, everything still was there.
The final test, however, had me start at the perimeter of my base with an attached element, then attach the next element, destroy the previous one and place the next one still farther away until I was about ten squares away. I then extended that to 25 elements, exited and reloaded - and POOF! Everything was gone.
This last attempt rules the Land Claim system out as the previous attempts would have messed it up as well, alas, they haven’t. Obviously something else is going haywire internally, the question here is what that could be.
Obviously when you branch off from an existing base, that seems to be counted toward the total number of elements belonging to that base, and if you exceed critical mass, everything gets blown to dust whereas when you set up unconnected bases, they are counted separately, and everything remains where it is.
Ive had the game for about 6 months on ps5. In that time ive lost several entire bases and everything in them. Exactly as you described. Log in to find thralls flying in the air where the base used to be. Happens in Siptah as well. Has funcom even acknowledged that they know about this issue?
Single player has never been able to handle too much on ps4. It use to just crash and you couldn’t log into the single player server. At that point I’d usually just wipe it and start over. This is no surprise.
Update concerning Age of War, Chapter 2
Looks like something in the newest update for Age of War is messing with the base metadata. Although a pre-chapter-2 save is loaded normally and the base is showing up, exiting the game trashes the save file. As it appears some internal changes have had a negative impact on how many elements can be registered to a particular base (the size has decreased, alas, I cannot tell as of now by what amount).
This, however, is a nuisance if you want to continue playing with your existing base, but that is just wiped clean after exiting the game and resuming (had me restore from the cloud with a working save file - unfortunately some activities from the last backup prior to the update till the update have been lost).
Edith says:
Taking this into account, all but one possibility where things could get messed up can be ruled out. The sole survivor in this case is a partially malfunctioning save function which is incapable of handling very large bases: If your base is growing too big, no or corrupted data from any affected bases seems to be written to the save file, which is corroborated by the fact that loading the original file takes significantly longer than the corrupted/truncated save file. Given that the length of the save file doesn’t shrink in the process, this has me believe that any base data is still written to the save file, but for some reason the data written is inconsistent and so gets discarded when restored.
Since this inconsistent data obviously gets discarded, very little CPU time is required, and the save file gets processed significantly faster. In contrast to the original save file which could take up to half a minute to load on a PS5, the inconsistent version only took about ten seconds.
They have and are at it. The tricky part, however, is finding out where the milk turns sour in the entire process of saving the game.
That the inconsistencies are introduced during saving now is a certainty (I’ve fired Conan Exiles with AoW II up, and the save file from before that was read just fine, but after exiting and restoring without any modifications done to the base, the entire base was toast).
I have noticed yet another thing:
When you are playing either of the maps, you get three save files instead of the expected two (play on both maps and you have four save files).
Peeking into the storage pool for saved games, specifically Conan Exiles, I get the following list:
- User Settings
- Single Player / Co-op game data (Isle of Siptah)
- Single Player / Co-op game data
- Single Player / Co-op game data (Exiled Lands)
The question is: Does the third (i. e. unassociated) save file save any purpose as of now, or has it become obsolete with the introduction if the Isle of Siptah add-on?
Could this particular save file interfere when resuming a game?
From what I have noticed, it obviously gets the data associated with the map that you are playing on.
Another thing that has caught my attention when examining this: All files containing the game data have a fixed size of 64.2 MBytes no matter how much or little has been constructed on that particular map. This fixed size could therefore be a limiting factor (save files of variable size are much more flexible, for obvious reasons).
I am very surprised to see this post. Back on march 2022 when I lost my base at single player with the same way you say in your post, an friend told me that I lost my base because I had to manually back up my game files and didn’t have my psn set to auto save Conan Exiles 's game and I must always have it on auto to be safe.
But thanks to you I confirmed today, that my friend was totally wrong.
Thanks for posting this. 
Lost another entire base today. At this point I think incompetance is the only reason they never fix anything
If you have builded your base on resources at single player and messed with the settings of their respawn time, you will experience what you have already experienced.
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