An aspect that hasn’t been touched on is that if you want to reap the benefits of your victory over whatever dungeon you’ve cleared, you can't save. As soon as you save, all of the treasure that you fought so hard to acquire but couldn't fit in your limited backpack space disappears. Clearing out a dungeon in any game is awesome because you get all kinds of cool experience and TREASURE, but the limited backpack space of Stone Shard and having to travel through multiple, very dangerous map squares to be able to cash in means that all the work the dev team went through to make a large variety of well thought out, well-developed treasure has been for nothing.

Scenario: I've just cleared a dungeon, my backpack is full of the necessities, gold and a map (about half my backpack space), and I've filled the rest with ingots and books (highest value for the space). I travel back to town, cash in, but don't save because there are also several pieces of weapons and armor left behind as well as several furs from random encounters, and that's several hundred gold pieces worth of stuff. With the cost of constantly having to buy food and medical supplies, I need that money if I’m ever going to afford better equipment and books. So I go back to the dungeon and load up half my backpack again. Make it back to town, sell, don’t save, and head out for a third trip. This time a bear ambushes me on my way back and I’m killed. Everything is lost.

When Diablo came out in 1997, 23 years ago, you could save your game and come back and still collect all of the treasure from where you had left it (a lot of game time went to simply going back and forth between dungeon and town to sell treasure). Procedural World Generation is a nice concept by the Dev team, but it denies the players the opportunity to actually benefit from their exploits. You can either play it safe and save your progress or take a chance and try to gather your rewards. Unfortunately, as has been pointed out, when your levels go up the encounters become harder, so without being able to buy better equipment, the encounters quickly overwhelm you and the game becomes impossible to play.

Granted, when you return to the dungeon by the same path (without saving) the random encounters are greatly reduced. You can see the crows eating the party of bandits that you killed the last time you went through for instance. But greatly reduced doesn’t mean eliminated. All it takes is one bear, or one herd of bison that you hadn’t seen before, to kill your character and you have no way out. In the real world, if a hunter accidently came on a bear, he could climb a tree and wait for the bear to leave. In Stone Shard if you find a bear, he follows you from map to map until you are dead.

One possible fix is to allow treasure that you don’t want to keep to be converted into gold in the dungeon as has been done in other games. Another possible fix is that the ‘save caravans’ that are talked about could meet you outside of dungeons and you could load them up with stuff to take back to town for you so that you could pick it up and sell it when you get there. Quick travel would solve the problem as long as you didn’t have to fight randomly generated new ‘guards’ at the entrance to cleared out dungeons.

Microsoft Access (not one of the most powerful database engines) allows real-time updates of databases of millions of items by multiple users at the same time. The decision not to do background saves of changes to item placement so that the game could be saved quickly on the fly while keeping status changes is a developer decision, not a necessity of the software. There is plenty of downtime while a player is thinking of his next move or looking around for which button to click to allow for background saves. The programming is more complex, but other games have done it.

You might say that with background saves of item status the game will be savable, but it will take longer to load. I’m good with that. Put a progress bar in during load up that says “Loading character”, zip, done, “Loading missions”, zip, done, “Loading locations of all the treasure you haven’t claimed”, and I’ll wait happily watching the progress bar as the computer grinds its way through the list. If people aren’t happy with this, give them an option to not save unclaimed treasures and they’ll get a fast startup. This problem is fixable.

All in all, this problem of not getting the reward for my work is a deal killer for me. I will wait until new updates come out before playing again, and hopefully, this issue will have been addressed.

Besides the pro&cons for a save at any time,
the loot in the dungeon (contrary to stuff on the flloor at non town maps) stays (at least from me experience) til you turn in the quest. So its totally possible to hoard all your dungeon loot and bring it back to town while traveling to the dungoen multiple times . It just takes more walking and - thats IMPORTANT- more risk. walking back & forth multiple time is intended to be risky, so if you want to keep all the loot, be brave.
if you save between those walks your char and all stuff in containers is at least safe . things in dungeons arent saved, but ya, in case you want to secure it all (whats not intended afaik), walk and take the risks.

technically i agree, that it shoule be possible to make kind of diferential saves, so the overall efford stays low. (a complete ram snapshot is sometimes even faster than the serialization in some games..)

I hadn't tried saving without turning in the quest. Thanks, I'll try that.

I did a very poor job of making my original point because I skipped around so much. The problem with not being able to get all of the treasure is that the opponents seem to keep up with you in abilities, but their equipment is poorer than what is available to you. At 6th level you will have outside encounters against three or more NPCs with 6th level abilities (outside you can't control their access to you). The only advantage you have is if you have been able to afford better equipment than them. Between the cost of repairing your old equipment, medicine, and food for every expedition, you find that your equipment is not keeping up with the challenge. The game becomes unplayable at higher levels.

I have only played 32 hours and gotten only one character up to 6th level (the archer). It is possible that I could have done a better job of money management and gotten better equipment by this time, but this seems to be a geometric issue. 3 7th level characters are much more dangerous than 3 6th level characters, so even better equipment will be needed when you get to 7th level, then even better at 8th level.

UPDATE: I restarted with the female wizard and did things a little different this time. I am at level 8 and have the equipment I need to stay competitive. The suggestion of saving without completing the mission made a huge difference. Thank you. It looks like the game is doable at higher levels, but there is a lot of grinding involved. So, I'm back to the game.