The only difference I know of to saves is theat we now have 15 game save slots available. I never heard of any limit to save size or that being made larger.


Actually I take that back. The update notes do say larger saves now along with the 15 slots.

It's a rather strange phrase, as when opening and reading a file, you usually do not check the size (you couldn't care less as long as the data is valid), and the actual file size on saving is also usually not known (unless approximated or pre-calculated) which usually no one does. The file size would be however limited when writing on FAT, but afaik you cannot install Win7+ on FAT anyway, and the save folder is in the users-appData, so on the system-disk.

It might be the storage of time in a to small variable type, because16 bit for seconds would be only 18.2 hours while 32 bit would be already 1193046 hours but if interpreted as milliseconds, that would be a maximum of 1193 hours. So maybe they changed the time storage to 64 bit for milliseconds now, which would allow for 5124095576030 hours of playtime, enough to visit a few more planets, but also enough to visit them all?

Another explanation would be a too small timeout on read or write operations, triggering an error-assumption when the HD is too slow. We probably will never know.