Minecraft Forums

In addition to "save and quit to title", minecraft should in my opinion based on the times I wanted to revert to a known state, there should be a "quit and abandon changes" button right below the "save and quit to title" button, why doesnt that exist tho?

Its annoying because I have had fire that have eaten half the world in a blink of an eye, or creeper gangs that have destroyed half the build, and I am like "time to revert" only to find there is no "quit and abandon changes" ANYWHERE!

Its extremely annoying and has cost me hours of work.

The game continuously saves chunks as you move around, otherwise it would require gigabytes of memory to hold everything unless you remain in a relatively small area, compared to what the typical player may explore, what with elytra and all, compounded by higher render distances (as if modern versions don't already need enough, I think somebody said the default is now 4 GB?! and otherwise with the way Java works you can't allocate an indeterminate amount of memory to the game / change the allocation dynamically at runtime so you'd need to quit and reload to increase it if needed). Keeping backup copies from a previous save point is also problematic due to the size of save files, and how many rollback points should there be?

You can however make regular backups of your worlds, as you should be doing for anything important to you (and ideally more than just making a copy on the same computer/drive, I've seen so many people lose worlds they spent even years on, all because they never backed them up and their hard drive crashed or whatever, or just some random corruption (the most common source of data loss is user error), and they never seem to learn their lesson. I mean, Windows even pesters me to back up once a month (the prompt lets me choose "remind me in 7 or 30 days", not "never again", as if to emphasize how important it is that you can't just indefinitely put it off. I don't use its service but back up my worlds with 4 copies of my first world (one on the cloud, one on an external drive, these are less frequently updated than the local backup, itself not daily) which I've maintained since early 2013 with over 5,200 hours of playtime (even the statistics, which were saved separately prior to 1.7 so a lot of old version players likely don't/didn't back them up even if they back up their worlds), and no, I've never had any corruption issues, perhaps so many people experience world corruption, most commonly mislocated chunks, because they don't close the game properly (perhaps to try to avoid saving; Alt+F4 or Task Manager immediately terminates the game, hopefully before an autosave occurred (including if you pause the game so this must be done without pausing), but this also carries a high risk of corruption).

There may also be mods that automatically backup a world when you start playing and/or make "restore points" at some interval.

From what I understand, it's because it's there's no graceful way to do this without drawbacks and tradeoffs of its own.

One of the primary reasons the game works the way it does now (where it saves as it goes) is because it only handles a portion of the world at once. Consider the scenario where a chunk is loaded, the chunk is changed, and then it needs to be unloaded because either you left the area or changed dimensions or whatever. At this point, the game has to make a decision to either save the changes or not. If you want it to defer this decision, you need to keep both instances. Where is the changed-but-unsaved instance kept? It needs to increase memory or storage requirements, and the latter would be the more practical one (I imagine memory use might become very high in some circumstances otherwise, as it would get worse as the render distance or simulation distances increases, or as you travel around more, because both of those increase the number of chunks the game is dealing with).

The new behavior brings a new consideration. If the game isn't saving as it goes, and something happens to cause the system to crash or lose power, you lose all of your progress instead of some (though the risk of corruption might be lower). So now players have to constantly instruct the game to save, which may be an annoyance for a lot of players. I would not like if this suggested behavior was switch to, for example.

You may be thinking "just make it an option". This works for some things, but not all. When you're talking about major, underlying game behaviors, it's harder to maintain multiple ways of doing something.

I imagine the choice of which way to do would need to be chosen before loading a save. In my mind, this partially defeats the purpose of the suggested behavior in the first place because most people won't know if they want to not save until game conditions have already played out.

A rewind feature (I know you're not suggesting this, but it's the "other way" around this) could do silly things to the hardware requirements, and they increase further the longer back you want the option of going (and again, this maximum time allowance needs decided upon up front, and again most players won't know how long they may want until the game conditions have already played out, which largely defeats the purpose and leaves you with a game X times heavier for the duration of playing for... almost no reason at all).

Maybe there's some magic solution to this without any of the drawbacks I'm mentioning, or other possible ones that I'm not mentioning (even if all of the others can be avoided, the time and effort to development and maintain can not be tossed aside as no drawback like some people like to do), but I'm not aware of it if it exists.

For better and worse, Minecraft is simply a game where your progress is permanent. There's better ways around this by simply keeping regular backups. I know not everyone wants to backup a save before every instance (I certainly don't), but there's "middle-ground" approaches with things like mods, creative mode, commands, game rules such as keep inventory, etc. Those solutions probably work well enough that completely changing major underlying game behavior isn't practical.

If you're wondering about the old console versions which apparently didn't save by default (I never played them so I don't know), they had a very small and fixed world size, which may have played into that.

Yeah other then closing the game without selecting the button (doesn't always solve it), the game is yeah always auto saving or has the quit and save button. So you sometimes have to just back up things before doing anything.

Even then you'd be turning off the 'auto save indicator' not the 'auto save' in general which is also annoying.

At least with Legacy Console you could exit and avoid the auto save. The intervals of 30 minutes or lower/higher, or turning it off. It was perfect.

Bedrock I can't remember its been a while but I still remember being annoying due to the server type session it offers. At least Java pauses even if in a way still kind of like a server, or whatever the thing around 1.3 was as well I forget. Or anything of the way worlds save/server logic or sessions work these days.

Java is just awkward and is very save happy and annoying to work around so you have to back up more often before doing anything. At least from my experience of each platform and many versions.

This is the thing that allows us to create huge worlds. The only way to roll back changes is to make regular backups. I make a backup before every gaming session. But that's professional paranoia, unrelated to gaming. I've lost important docs irl several times. Only once was it due to a technical failure; the rest of the time it was my own carelessness when editing.