More info: It was clear from the times that two new things had been done in the save directory when I tried today. All of my previous save files were in a directory with a long numeric key. Now there was also a newly-created save directory with the number 0, and a newly-created game_instructor_counts.txt with the following contents:

"KeyValueSaverData"
{
}

I think something must have erased the name of the actual save file directory and it defaulted to zero, but I'm not sure what did it. Anyway, I'm going to try physically copying all my save files into that new zero directory and see what happens.

That fixed it, though it doesn't explain how/why the game lost its info about what the save folder number was. It also, for some reason, reset the onscreen tips (how to use flashlight, etc).

The game stores the saved games based on your Steam account (that's the long numeric key). Since the new folder has the number zero, it sounds like Steam might've lost connectivity after the first saves were made.

There's probably a better way we could be handling this. I don't think we necessarily need to tie the saves to the Steam account at all. I'll have to see if this is something that we can improve in a future patch.

Hey, guess what the game did today!

So, to recap:

- Playing the game on Tuesday night, it was saving all the games in the Steam-ID-named saves folder.

- Playing the game on Wednesday night, it was saving all the games in the zero saves folder. I had to copy all my Tuesday save files into that folder by hand.

- Start the game tonight (Thursday) ... I'm back at the point near the end of chapter 3 that I was at the end of Tuesday night. Yup, the game is now trying to read saves from my Steam-ID-named save folder again!

Now I will go copy all of Wednesday night's files by hand back into the Steam-ID-named folder and it should be fine.

I'm not sure your theory about Steam disconnects is right but I'm not sure what could be causing this craziness.

By the by, last night I did not get the achievement for finishing chapter 3, and I have no idea whether that's because of these shenanigans or what.

I've created a new beta branch "2.3.4", which should solve the issue. It'll make the game "remember" the current save folder and then always proceed to use that same folder.

You can opt-into the beta by right-clicking INFRA on Steam, selecting "Betas" and "2.3.4". If it's not visible on the list, you might need to restart Steam first.

Please let me know if this solves the issue.

I don't think I can give you feedback, because I couldn't make the problem happen again. Once it switched from the zero folder back to the steam-ID folder, it stayed that way and the problem never recurred over the subsequent days I was playing the game. So it's impossible for me to tell whether the beta changes would have fixed it or not!

That's cool. Either way, the option is now there if this starts happening again in the future.