Baldur’s Gate 3’s Steam Cloud Save Syncing Is Killing My Internet
Baldur’s Gate 3’s Steam Cloud Save Syncing Is Killing My Internet
The more I play Baldur’s Gate 3, the more fun I am having, but as time has gone on, the more I find that the game is somehow breaking both Steam and my entire household internet.
I noticed at the start of the final act that my save folder had ballooned to 4.2 GB which seemed a bit outrageous to me. After a bit of digging, I found that for some reason if you play on 2 separate machines (steam deck and a desktop PC for example), the game was failing to replace your old saves with the new ones when switching, rather syncing the new saves made while leaving the old ones in place.
After manually deleting the saves and setting quick and auto save limits at 5, cloud syncing is infinitely faster due to a vastly reduced size. You do have to go in and delete all your old saves each time you swap platforms unfortunately, but this is at least a work around for those like myself who don't want to feel stuck only playing on one platform. It also makes the cloud syncing (at least through steam, I have the in game cloud sync option disabled) far less time consuming.
When it was stuck syncing, it would kill my entire internet. I believe the reason for this is that Baldur’s Gate 3’s save file pool is so massive, that this can be anywhere from a 500MB to 3GB upload that is taking place during this attempted sync, which is maxing out my internet’s bandwidth, and causing all the internet in my entire house to slow to a crawl.
Bruh.
I was annoyed to see my Valheim save file grow to 60MB and BG3 is taking 3 GB?
I turned off Steam Cloud saves and am just using Larion’s built in Cross-Save.
It only uploads you 5 most recent saves and it only takes a few seconds to sync upon opening the game, unlike Steam Cloud taking 20 minutes only to fail, then fail again, then fail again, etc
Consider this, every choice, every item you pick and sell, every item you move or break, every state of every npc has to get saved.. basically everything you have interacted with
All that stuff is no more than a few bytes, even considering the state of every object, NPC and quest in the entire game. It's more to do with how many saves it creates. 300kb is nothing. 300kb multiplied by 100,000 is significantly more tho.
My first autosave with a character that hasn't done much, it's 7.85MB + photo. So all the quick saves and auto saves (34 folders total) for a character who hasn't talked to Kalga yet is 528MB
A different character at the start of Act 2, 26.7 MB + photo. So this has auto saves, quick saves, and a few hard saves has 59 folders, for a total of 1.26 GB
The default number of saves is 25 auto and 25 quick; and this is per character. I can see it easily ballooning in size if you don't change the default down to like 3-5 each and also play multiple characters for different builds and experiences (or multiplayer).
I have noticed the cloud syncing taking a while (1 or 2 minutes) but other than that no issues. I do have a fast Internet connection though.
I exaggerated the time for cloud syncing. I timed it today and it was like 45 secs. My others game sync in like 5 or 10 secs.
I've been switching between my steam deck and my desktop a lot and I thought it was steam sync not working right. Turns out it works but it's just slow because it's uploading a massive amount of data
I've had the same issue. Sometimes I play on my steam deck and sometimes on my chromebook via GFN and the steam sync stuff never seems to work. I don't think GFN is giving enough time to let these seemingly huge files finish uploading before killing the VM.
Other games are fine with this dynamic so it feels like an issue specific to BG3.
I turned off cloud saves for it. It was murdering my patience when a friend would ask me to play another game while I was in a bg session. I cant figure out if it uploads ALL saves, or just the most recent. I quick save a ton, so i guess i could be to blame... But since im only playing on one pc, and not on my deck, i dont need the cloud save atm.
The game has an insanely high number of saves it keeps by default, 20 for both auto saves and quick saves. I reduced it to 10 for both as I never need to go that far back (or if I want the option I just make a manual save), that alone will cut your Steam Cloud size in half.
EDIT - The number is actually 25, even higher than I remembered.
Uh oh, I cranked that number way up because I thought it would be convenient... Am I going to be in trouble soon?
I like the cloud saves as a backup. You can manually back them up to a NAS or USB stick but so far it hasn't been a problem for me yet. I am in act 1 still.