Cyberpunk 2077 saves can get corrupted if you craft too much
A PSA to the crafters and hoarders of Night City
Watch out all you crafters and hoarders: a Cyberpunk 2077 bug is causing players' saves to become corrupted if the files become too large. It seems crafting in particular can help save files grow to dangerous sizes. CD Projekt Red are advising players to "use an older save file to continue playing and try to keep a lower amount of items and crafting materials" to avoid the problem, because once your files are corrupted, there's no getting them back.
"The save file size limit might be increased in one of the future patches, but the corrupted files will remain that way," a support page says.
While CDPR don't give hard numbers, some players report that saves become slow to load at 6MB, then past 8MB they become corrupted and won't even load.
While save file size should grow naturally as you do more in the game, it seems crafting in particular can push them to dangerous sizes. Several players on the CDPR forums have reported their save files grew permanently larger even after selling crafted items. You might be safe if you only casually dabble in crafting, but the system's skill tree sure encourages grinding it - and we shouldn't have to fear messing up our files by using an in-game feature.
While CDPR don't say not to use crafting, they do explicitly warn against another form of item multiplication: "If you have used the item duplication glitch, please load a save file not affected by it."
You can check your size by looking in the saves folder, which will usually be C:\Users\yourusername\Saved Games\CD Projekt Red\Cyberpunk 2077.
Cyberpunk 2077 got its second post-launch patch over the weekend, fixing a number of crashes, quest-interrupting bugs, hardware problems, and more. The devs said previously that "regular updates and fixes" will be coming to PC, so here's hoping these file size issues will be dealt with soon.
Graham's Cyberpunk 2077 review calls it "a big, beautiful and broken mess." Yep, that's truly the best description I can think of for this big edgy RPG.