What exactly is game.dat?

Context: My PC lost power while playing and I ended up with a corrupt save. I would have lost ~3-4 hours of time so I attempted to recover the save using suggestions online, which amount to generating a new save with the same seed, and then copying files from the corrupted save folder over to the new save folder until something breaks.

This worked... sort of. Originally the corrupted save wouldn't even show up in the list of saves to be loaded. I was able to copy over all files except for game.dat and still load the new frankensave. I do still get an "internal error occurred!" message when loading the save, at least when loading into my Akua playfield, but so far I'm able to just click "Continue" and ignore it.

I'll keep playing around with it, but my primary question is this: What exactly is game.dat? What information is encoded in it? And in my case, am I missing anything by using a newly-regenerated version from a new save?

It's only a 1KB binary file, so it can't contain all that much that would be unique to the original save. If I load a non-corrupted version of this file in a hex editor I see a few recognizable strings, such as "Default Random", and "v1.13.1", but the rest is gibberish. If I load my corrupted version in a hex editor I see that the file is a little longer, but the whole thing is filled with zeros.

I see some old release notes for version 1.3 mentioning some changes attempting to make the file more robust and generate backups. In my case both the live and backup files were equally corrupted though, so apparently the backup mechanism is not asynchronous or robust enough to handle what got thrown at it in my case.

 

Thanks for the information. That makes sense.

I did eventually realize that my reputation data had been lost, so I assumed that it probably at least contained that.

As you say, I also ran into further issues where my primary Akua base ended up being used as a POI in another playfield (pretty hilarious side effect), and then disappearing from its location in Akua, which makes some sense if game.dat tracks entity ids I guess.

Anyway, in my case I ended up mostly rebuilding my save by starting a fresh save, importing my base, SV, and CV as blueprints, and copying over their inventory using their 0.area files. I can restore my faction reputation, credits, etc. with console commands. The only thing left is the story progression. I know I can manually check the mission boxes, but I keep hitting roadblocks where the story won't progress unless I physically go to the story POIs.