I lost my zoo. I'm done with franchise mode for good.

[NL_Mutso]

Had this issue a week ago, deleted my last savegame of that zoo and it worked. Lost a lot of progress...
Already played the game less in the last week, mostly of this..

Today same issue, tried it again. doesn't seem to fix it for my main zoo.. (veryfing files doesn't help). No problems with the other 2 smaller zoos..
Shame, about to lose a $4 million zoo because of this.. And not able to contribute as much to the challenge.. So no rewards

The reports with infitnite loading are unfortunately not even marked as acknowledged

I know, don't see this fixed anytime soon bc of this...

Already found this one, the earlier mentioned issue is for actual crashing, not for stuck in loading screen :

https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/10018

 

[KaoRu]

Yeah, it didn't help. Strangely enough I was able to get it to load an old save by denying write permissions to the saves folder. I'm still not exactly sure where the deleted saves were being restored from, but whatever. It's still hours of work lost though, and my young animals are for some reason all in the trade centre. But at least I didn't lose the entire thing, for now. I'll still leave this thread here so the devs can see it and investigate, although a lot of people have reported the same problem previously.

Strangely all my saves from the beta are still in the game. The Devs said they would be deleted but they're definitely there when I click "My Zoo's".

 

[Arletario]

Shame, about to lose a $4 million zoo because of this.. And not able to contribute as much to the challenge.. So no rewards

Yes that's really bad, I'm sorry to hear that

Already found this one, the earlier mentioned issue is for actual crashing, not for stuck in loading screen :

Do you mean the link I posted to the Issue Tracker? Yes, it was a bug report for both problems. There were many other comments on this topic and some replies from Frontier. However, since they have marked the bug as "fixed", it will probably be updated in the next patch and all comments are gone.

Just out of curiosity - do you use the Steam-Cloud to save your game, or just on your PC?

 

[NL_Mutso]

Ahh.. I understand

I use Steam cloud..

 

[Arletario]

Well, it's just a guess, but maybe it's a problem with the Steam Cloud. I also used it and sometimes it took forever to sync the savegames.

After losing my first big franchise zoo with 450 animals a week ago, I started a new zoo. And the same #+§$# happened again 3 days ago. When I try to load both savegames, it's just an endless loading screen, so another zoo with almost 200 animals just disappeared...

Now I disabled the Steam Cloud and I copy the savegame to a new folder manually after playing for a while. That way I'll might lose some hours of gameplay, but not a whole zoo if it's happening again. No corrupt savegames yet.

 

[EFZ]

Well, it's just a guess, but maybe it's a problem with the Steam Cloud. I also used it and sometimes it took forever to sync the savegames.

After losing my first big franchise zoo with 450 animals a week ago, I started a new zoo. And the same #+§$# happened again 3 days ago. When I try to load both savegames, it's just an endless loading screen, so another zoo with almost 200 animals just disappeared...

Now I disabled the Steam Cloud and I copy the savegame to a new folder manually after playing for a while. That way I'll might lose some hours of gameplay, but not a whole zoo if it's happening again. No corrupt savegames yet.

Wait, what do you mean you copied the save game to a new folder? Did you make a new folder for your saves? I'm asking because I disabled Steam cloud, went back to my older, uncorrupted save, and played for about an hour. But then when I tried to load the new save again, without Steam Cloud this time, the infinite load screen still happened.

 

[Arletario]

Oh okay ... so it's happening without the Steam Cloud too, which means it looks like it's the game itself - that's good to know.

But yes, the default directory is:
%USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\Frontier Developments\Planet Zoo\<user-id>\Saves
<user-id> is your Steam64-ID which contains 17 numbers and starts with 7656

I simply copy my franchise savegames one level up:
%USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\Frontier Developments\Planet Zoo\<user-id>\
Of course you can also create your own folder somewhere.

However, if the game crashes the savegames, this method is not as promising as it sounds, as it is still unknown what it actually triggers and it would be possible to copy an already corrupt save. So, I really hope that the bug can be fixed soon.

Mh, another question: Did your Work Zones also begin to disappear before the savegame became unplayable? I mean not all of them, just randomly here and there. At least that's what I noticed in my two zoos. Normally, the work zones are displayed by the whole habitat barriers, but due to an unknown circumstance, some of the barriers weren't displayed as Zones anymore only the habitat gates remained as Zones. I tried to fix it in rebuiling the barriers, but eventually the whole save did not work anymore.

 

[EFZ]

This is interesting, and it's something I might try anyway. I've been waiting for a solution from the devs or a patch but that's been a bit slow coming. Thanks for the suggestion.

As for the workzones, I haven't really noticed. It's something I'll have to check. One thing I have notcied is that when I load my last uncorrupted save, all the baby animals seem to have moved in the trade centre. Just moving all of them back into the zoo takes about an hour of itself. Has anyone else also had this happen?

 

[Arletario]

Holy smokes!

I had no idea that this will ever happen when the savegames are already broken ... BUT... they have actually fixed it with the 1.03 patch, both of my broken Franchise Zoos savegames are working again!

Thank you, Frontier!

The bug with the disappearing Work Zones on habitat barriers is still there, but maybe I'm now able to rebuild the enclosures.

 

[ASalton1]

The same thing happened to my zoo about 4 days after release. I ended up creating a completely different zoo and closed my zoo that wouldn’t open. It gave me 20k CC for the animals that were in my bugged zoo and allowed me to jumpstart a new themed zoo. Maybe just close the zoo and start again? At least you’ll get the CC from the animals once you close the zoo.

 

[Amrah]

My zoo is still not loading, even after update 1.0.3

 

[Highelf]

My zoo in challenge mode has this exact issue and is not fixed with the new patch. I have a working save that I played on for a while, the next day it didnt load. So I rolled back and ignored it, it was only a few hours of gameplay. Then I played a much longer session and the same issue happens.
Now when I load the last working save, whatever I do, the next save doesnt load anymore.

This bug has completely rendered the game useless for me since why the hell would I dump hours into any zoo if the save just goes corrupt.

I have played 3 zoos in this game, 2 were lost to corrupt saves (error on load) and the last, biggest ones on endless loading bug. On top of the other these are totally game breaking and I have seen 0 word on them from Frontier.

Either way they have lost my business forever, I only want my moneys worth now - FIX the GAME BREAKING BUGS, please!

 

[PeppyPepp]

So this happened to my BF yesterday.

He lost his zoo in franchise mode. It would stop at the green loading screen (bear walking) and it just kept loading and loading. We tried deleting the save and launching the previous one and the last one just mysteriously appeared in the game. We tried launching it on my computer to no avail. None of the saves worked.

Frontier, I'm extremely disappointed. We can handle the little bugs here and there, but this is absolutely completely game breaking for both of us. I'm a little afraid to play my own franchise now to be honest cause it's my 3rd one and the first one I'm sort of happy about and now I'm just scared that one day it's not going to load. Please please PLEASE fix it. I've put it on the issue tracker.

 

[NL_Mutso]

The same thing happened to my zoo about 4 days after release. I ended up creating a completely different zoo and closed my zoo that wouldn’t open. It gave me 20k CC for the animals that were in my bugged zoo and allowed me to jumpstart a new themed zoo. Maybe just close the zoo and start again? At least you’ll get the CC from the animals once you close the zoo.

I get your point.. I started an extra new one..

But there's a big difference in 4 days and 3 weeks..
If I start over again (i got over 120k CC, that's no issue) and the same issue happens again after 3 weeks. That's a lot of wasted effort.
My biggest annoyance with this, that I'm not able to participate with the challenge - got a few new pandas with really good fertility but none are breeding.