Q: Why do you break my saved games virtually every week? Do you even know how to code?

The reason the saved games are less stable than a typical game is that the save system is quite a bit more complex than a typical game, and the save system is quite an old binary-serialization design that doesn't make use of some technical tools like protocol buffers that came into use more recently that make some upgrade issues easier.

Most games can just save a "type" (like goblin) and a very few mallebale stats. Since in Qud any object is completely fungible in complexity with a PC, and since any object is completely malleable (any wall can become a creature, for example, etc etc) AND since we make heavy uses of that fact, we have to save a (potentially) much more complex description for most objects which is related to the code itself (i.e. you've got X components and they're configured in this Y way), and so if the code changes at all the serialization becomes unstable. (i.e. if we add some new fields or rename a component, which is happening a lot in EA as we add features/improve the design, the save becomes incompatible without field flagging/upgrade scripting)

If I re-wrote the save system from scratch I could probably make it much more stable, but it would be at the cost of weeks or months of bugs that would just obliterate otherwise stable games. The current save system has the (pretty large imo) upside of actually being very, very stable as long as you're playing a particular version. This is nice, because irreparably corrupt saves at random is pretty unfun!

Upgrade scripts in the system are possible, but it would be quite a lot of work to script, test and guarentee upgrades every single week when we're moving at the pace that actually-ever-releasing-the-game is going to take, so we've just decided to keep as many old versions live as we can (5+ months with what steam gives us) and not worry about compatibility upgrade scripts/testing for the EA duration.