Friends and I were playing a multiplayer game last night. Saved the game and came back today. Played for a few hours, took a break, then came back and tried reloading. A message pops up telling me that the file includes content that is either missing or disabled. I look at my saves, and somewhere between turns 104 and 130, the “early bird bonus” DLC inserted itself out of nowhere. I know this couldnt have been either me or my friends, because none of us pre-ordered the game. We all have it from Gamepass. I genuinely would have purchased the DLC if any other content was activated randomly, but for some reason, it was the early bird bonus. Now my friends dont even want to play the game out because we lost hours of progress and reset multiple wars. 

This is literally a game breaking bug. It’s so game breaking, that it acts more like a corruption of the save file than just a standard bug. Is this a common thing? Will it happen again in the future? Or are we forced to leave the games open and never risk saving and loading again? 

Hey,

Thanks for the report. We're aware of the issue and investigating the cause, but unfortunately I have not heard any further news about a fix yet.

Yes! I’ve had the same issue. This is the third time now I’ve been unable to load any save game and had to start another game right from the beginning cuz it says I don’t have the right files. Early bird bonus, deluxe, cultures of Africa pack, cultures of Latin America pack.

I love the game so will continue playing but I’d love to be able to actually finish a game. 

Ive encountered the same issue every single game I've played, at most I get to 130 turns, this time only 51. Could any A.I have the content despite other players not having it? I don't play it online especially of fear of this bug. 

The game is great fun, plenty of awesome mechanics you guys have let us sink our teeth into, it can just be a real stomper though that I have some badass classical and even a couple medieval era civilizations, that just may now never be played through

Thank you for the additional reports and the added information.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

Thank you for the additional reports and the added information.

Happened once more to me, and here is the sequence of events leading up to it: To set up the context, I need to say that my friends and I were testing a mechanic (maybe a war declarations effect on trade? Cant exactly remember but thats irrelevant), and so we made a manual save, tested what we wanted to test, didn’t like what we saw, so we reloaded the manual save SUCCESSFULLY. We continued playing as normal. About 10 turns later, I was in a battle. It went on for a turn, played out 3 rounds, then the next turn came about. I walked an army of a few greatswordsmen and crossbows over to the boundaries of the battle and stepped them inside of the ongoing fight. My game crashed. Upon reloading, the auto-save had been injected with unowned Deluxe DLC once again. What is SIGNIFICANTLY interesting is that the manual save that we had made earlier AND successfully loaded without issue ALSO was affected by this DLC injection. 

As I’ve already stated, this functions almost like a corruption of the file. It’s effectively ransomware. Upon the crashing of the game, it completely erased the progress that we had made for that day unless I purchased the Deluxe edition of the game (one of my friends is very new to the game so 15 turns at war on humankind difficulty translates to several hours). The only reason I readily paid for that instead of the 3 of us sacking that save and moving on to play a different game all together is because Humankind is worth the price of admission. I will happily support the dev team and studio that made this masterpiece. But please, for the love of all the is good, fix. this. issue. I’m so scared that pretty soon, my files are going to be injected with the Early Bird DLC (which I CANNOT purchase) every time my friends and I try to start a game. If that happens, I will most likely request a refund because this is bug is game breaking. 

This bug has now ruined progress on two of my gameplays one with about 570 turns, which as you can imagine is incredibly frustrating.

This game has been anticipated for some time after it was delayed for a further year and have thoroughly enjoyed playing it so far, but this is a huge disappointment and is not fixable from the gamers end.

Is there an update for when a patch is coming? 

Why has there been no update on this? This is a gamebreaking bug and it's happened to me and my friend 3 times now. It's making the multiplayer unplayable. Three times now we've spent 3-4 hours in an evening on a game, only to try to load it the next day and get the same "Early bird bonus" error that locks us out of our save.

it's not good enough. Why hasn't there been any response in 7 days on this issue?

Same thing happened to me last night. Missing deluxe content now shows on all my last playthrough saves (I'm on turn 237, contemporary era, on a huge map, using xbox gamepass version). I've been looking through threads and this game breaking issue is somewhat common. Super bummer, I guess I'll save myself the frustration and move on to a different game. Hope it gets fixed soon because its a great game (I also play it on PC)

Yep, such a big disappointment ? I lost my progress because of it! I'm playing on Xbox and I have this game from the GamePass. After the saving it says I have a deluxe content,but I'm not.Tag me when it will be fixed, pls. Btw I was thinking about buying DLS, but after this problem I'm not sure about it 

Im on turn 173 and this early bird bound bug just killed it so what are you supposed to do start a new game can we buy the pre-order content???