Saved games changed into two naked guys on the edge of map?!

Hello I hope this is the right section for this post,

This is my first time playing and I just finished some epic battles in the black mountain mines and saved my game, then Arcanum froze on a loading screen. Once I restarted the game my saves (upon loading them) are now two naked guys located on the very top right edge of the map in fields of never ending green grass. My character also now happens to be a level 1 human hanging out with a shopkeeper that is an exact look-a-like(they both have zero items) and a chest full of random stuff.

I am able to start a new game a save/load alright, but I would really love to get my level 27 dwarf gunslinger back.

I tried searching the forums but couldn't find any info, does any one know how I can get my saved games back? I can put some screenshots up if none of you have seen this before.

 

Your save got corrupted. Congratulations.

Use multiple save slots the next time. And I hope you're at least using the 1.0.7.4 patch, as it solves some save corruption problems.

 

Sorry I should have mentioned I am using the 1.0.7.4 patch and the unofficial patch. I did use multiple saves and as mentioned in my first post my saves are all messed up.

Guess there's nothing I can do, thanks for your help though. Do you know what generally causes this to happen so I can try to avoid it in the future or is it pretty random?

 

All of them at once? Strange.

I haven't got a corrupted save in at least a few years, but people continue to mention this issue from time to time. I believe save corruption is related to the game performance, i.e. if the game runs sluggishly, there may be a chance of your save getting corrupted during the saving process. But I have no idea how the game would corrupt all of your saves at once.

Just in case, try reinstalling the game and loading those saves. (Savegames are stored in 'modules\Arcanum\saves'.)

 

The problem might lie in the filesystem, at least it is very similar to an experience of mine.

At one time, I reinstalled Windows XP with the file system intact, and Sony Vegas stopped recognizing a lot of my video projects.

Turned out, Windows thought I was a different user than of the previous installation, and denied read access to any of the files where the owner was the old account.

Try checking if you can read the saved games with a file viewer (e.g. total commander's lister).

 

At one time I ran Arcanum, patched as advised, on a laptop that was beginning to reach the end of its lifespan, so to speak. The game ran quite slowly at times and during saving could easily corrupt a game save if there was too much of a delay. I used multiple saves after that. There were no indications of corruption, but when I attempted to open my latest save at one point, I was greeted by the same thing as YeeOldeGorbulous.

The large problem I had was that every earlier save did the same thing. I deleted them from the saves folder and started over. The computer I use now runs the game perfectly, and I've never had a corrupted save with it. I tried on Vista at one point, and I believe the sluggish nature of running it under that OS was the reason for a few corrupt saves there as well.

So I can say I consider corruption a matter of performance as well. Somehow it has a potential of disrupting each save, and so if there's no other computer available, I'd advise creating a backup folder and copying the contents of the saves folder into there every so often.