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

[EFZ]

I liked the idea of franchise mode. I wanted to play it and enjoy it. I liked animals being able to be traded in a global marketplace of players and all that. The fun started going out of it a bit when prices started getting ridiculous in the market, with people asking for 5000 cc for a bog standard male zebra.

But today I got home, booted up the game, and lo and behold, infinite loading screen. I had seen people having this issue before but just hoped it was rare enough that it wouldn't affect me. I'm really irritated though, because I had spent hours and hours on that zoo and now I have to start over. I looked around for a solution and some people suggested deleting the save files. I tried that, but whenever I open the game again the deleted saves mysteriously reappear in the folder and I'm back on the infinite loading screen. I don't even know where they come from, because I even tried disconnecting my PC from the internet and they still come back like some sort of bad disease. If anyone has any ideas I'd greatly appreciate it. Otherwise I'm done playing half-baked game modes for good, or at least until they stop these game-breaking bugs from happening. Until now I thought the time progression was the biggest issue with the game currently. But no, if even a handful of people are getting their hours of gameplay thrown in the bin because of bugs, this is by far the biggest problem with the game. Which genius decided the saves for franchise have to be all online anyway?

 

[Snaffles1301]

Did you do the verifying game files thing?

 

[EFZ]

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.

 

[jooxis]

I hope you get this sorted - I fear this will happen to me too at some point so I'm trying not to get too invested in my franchise. I do hope the team is able to fix this issue down the line. I feel the game should continually be autosaving every 5-10 min or so and if for example one gets corrupted, it should automatically load the previous newest one... or some such system.

 

[Chante Goodman]

@EFZ have you made a report about this on the Issue Tracker? The team are looking into the hanging on the loading screen issue now, and they're currently working on a fix, but it helps when we get people sharing their experiences and specs on the Issue Tracker. Instead of making a report, you could help to confirm someone elses too!

 

[Agathorn]

@EFZ have you made a report about this on the Issue Tracker? The team are looking into the hanging on the loading screen issue now, and they're currently working on a fix, but it helps when we get people sharing their experiences and specs on the Issue Tracker. Instead of making a report, you could help to confirm someone elses too!

Just wanted to highlight the "and specs" part of Chante's post. I keep seeing people reporting issues, like this one, but not filling out specs. I know its a lot more to fill out, and for many issues it doesn't really matter anyway, but for issues like these it really does matter because 9 times out of 10 the bug is going to come down to certain hardware conditions causing something unexpected to happen.

Also you can attach a savefile to your issue.

 

[Xordus]

My game is stuck on the loading screen too. One way to get around it is to put Steam in 'offline mode', but that only allows you to play Campaign/Sandbox. Franchise mode is completely non-functional atm for me.

 

[EFZ]

@Chante Goodman I'm going to do that, thanks for working on a fix for this!

 

[taun]

@Chante Goodman I'm going to do that, thanks for working on a fix for this!

Hopefully a fix is found, I had this issue. Lost my first franchise zoo and had to start again. Mine happened after an in game crash (my only crash in game). I would report an issue but had issues accessing it.

What is verfying save thing?

 

[Dr4gon]

Learn your lesson and move on. Always keep a backup zoo. It's just a game, you will get over it. The animals need you

 

[Arletario]

I have the same issue with my biggest Franchise Zoo now, too. After patching the game today, I was able to load that savegame. But once I've saved it again some minutes ago, only an infinite loading screen is displayed when trying to load it. My smaller Franchise Zoo savegames are working fine, but it seems like my zoo, which is dedicated to the breeding of good and healthy animals, is gone - over 400 golden and silver rated animals of 46 species. Nice!
I hope this can be fixed.

Here is a link to the Issue Tracker about this topic:

webapp

issues.frontierstore.net

I would report an issue but had issues accessing it.

Maybe you can try another browser. I can only log in to the Issue Tracker website with my Opera browser. Firefox and Chrome don't work for me.

 

[taun]

Learn your lesson and move on. Always keep a backup zoo. It's just a game, you will get over it. The animals need you

Very helpful...

 

[taun]

Here is a link to the Issue Tracker about this topic:

webapp

issues.frontierstore.net

Maybe you can try another browser. I can only log in to the Issue Tracker website with my Opera browser. Firefox and Chrome don't work for me.

Thanks, I shall try later.

 

[peon2t]

Learn your lesson and move on. Always keep a backup zoo. It's just a game, you will get over it. The animals need you

What lesson? Not buying games that are released in a heavily bugged state? ;-)

 

[Arletario]

Yes, that's the only lesson. Planet Zoo was definitely the last game I pre-ordered.

 

[Dr4gon]

No, always keep a backup zoo. When one fails, you still have your leaves and your stored animals in your next zoo.

 

[taun]

No, always keep a backup zoo. When one fails, you still have your leaves and your stored animals in your next zoo.

You keep leave no matter what but the animals in your zoo you lose....you cannot have them some where else. Really not being helpful to those with a genuine issue.

 

[EFZ]

Just an update, if anyone from the dev team is still watching. It happened again today. After going back hours to an older save and remaking some of my lost progress now the new save is doing it too. The link that @Arletario has posted shows the issue as fixed, which is far from the case.

 

[Amrah]

Just an update, if anyone from the dev team is still watching. It happened again today. After going back hours to an older save and remaking some of my lost progress now the new save is doing it too. The link that @Arletario has posted shows the issue as fixed, which is far from the case.

I think 'crash on loading' and 'infitnite loading' are considered differnet issues. The reports with infitnite loading are unfortunately not even marked as acknowledged.,

I really want to play my first franchise zoo again

 

[Arletario]

Yes, since yesterday the status on the Issue Tracker website is "fixed". This just means that they have (hopefully) fixed the bug, but that does not mean that it is now automatically in ht live game. We have to wait for the patch to be released.