Love the game enough to play for hours at a time. Lost a lot of desire to play the game after playing for 3 hours and my game crashed so hard that my computer restarted itself. Everything I did during that time has been erased since nothing is saved unless you exit the game or do a manual save. Is there any way to set an auto save? Or do I have to manual save a new game file or quit the game and restart it every time I want to save?
Empyrion is an hybrid at the moment : it has "auto-save" but it's only useful if we save at least once and then reload the game and then it is "active". I'm not saying this is not irritating, I'm often caught offguard myself sometimes in games that require regular saves, playing too long and having a sudden crash that then brings up the memory of what I forgot to do. This has been requested a few times already, and also the possibility to not overwrite the main savegame we loaded when we exit, so to keep it in its original state if we want to reload in case we make a mistake. In other words, a "conventional" game saving system where we can choose not to save when exiting, and we can load any old save without having it overwritten when exiting. But then we can't have auto-save with this system...
You can make a manual backup save while in game. ESC > hit the save icon. This will create a new save game copy that you can go back to at a later time if needed. Just remember that if you resume that backup copy, you should make a new backup at that time. Empyrion is essentially constantly saving your game progress as you play, but sometimes catastrophic PC crashes can cause lost work or save game corruption. Sadly there is no surefire way to guard against this besides making backup saves like I mentioned.
