Hotfix - v1.5.202

If you've seen the reviews about saves disappearing after a power cut or a PC restart, this is the patch that fixes it. Two specific reviews from April 30 and a small pile of similar reports lined up on the same root cause, so I rebuilt the save backup pipeline from the ground up.

What was wrong

The game wrote one backup file next to the main save. A power loss at exactly the wrong moment could corrupt both at once, and then Steam Cloud would sync the broken save to your other machines. No way back from there.

What's different now

Two backup generations instead of one. The current backup gets rotated to a "previous" slot before any new write, so if the new backup write gets cut off, the older snapshot is still intact.

Backup writes now actually hit the physical disk before the game treats them as done. Modern operating systems delay disk writes for performance, and a power loss in that delay window used to take everything with it. The new code forces the OS to commit the bytes to the platter before moving on (fsync on Mac and Linux, FlushFileBuffers on Windows).

Every save write is verified by re-reading the file before the backup gets touched. If somehow the main save came out unparseable, recovery falls back to the previous backup instead of overwriting it with the bad data.

Recovery is non-destructive now. The old code consumed the backup during recovery, so a single bad attempt could leave you with no backup at all. The new code copies the backup into place instead and keeps the source untouched for the next try.

The "Wipe and Restart" button actually wipes everything now. The old version was leaving backup files behind, so the next launch would silently restore your old progress. That probably explains a couple of "I can't reset my save" reports I couldn't reproduce.

Side files that were bypassing the protections

The hardening above existed for the main save, but three side files (wheel drop timer, jukebox playlist, Steam progression) were writing directly without going through the protected path. They all route through the same pipeline now.

One thing I can't fix

If you've already lost progress to this bug, this patch can't bring it back. I'm sorry. But it shouldn't happen to you again. If something still feels off after the update, ping me on the forums.

See you on the road, – Tolga