Hi!

I’m currently working on a 30 generation legacy challenge, using ea worlds, and several custom worlds, right now I’m playtesting and I’m at gen 3.

I’ve noticed that in my first world my save size was like 25mb, but now its at about 80-90 without traveling to destination worlds. Basic maths makes 800-900mb of save file by the time I’m at gen 30, without traveling to destination worlds. I always use regul’s save cleaner, always use ‘save as’ every startup.

Is there a way to keep the file size down with traveler? Or maybe deleting previous .world files from the save file? One of the concepts, and most important part of the challenge is to have a greeting card/photo booth picture/painting/sculpture of the heir and his/her spouse, but thats the only thing important to keep from a previous world, past friendships & relationships are not that important.

Do you have any ideas? I would love to make this challenge public, however I do not want people who play it to run into problems with bloated save files.

A full copy of the world data of each world that is visited is kept in the save. This isn't 'bloat' so much as just how it works, even for the WA destinations without Traveler in play- which you likely know, but sometimes it's good to clarify that Traveler isn't actually doing anything wrong here and it's just something that comes with the territory

When I'm done with an old ex-homeworld and sure I'm never returning, I use MasterController Total Annihilation on the population (using the Homeworld filter to find them) and then delete the .nhd and ExportDB package from the save folder.
What is less documented is how safe it is to ever return to a world that was deleted- there are some oddities that can happen if the game goes looking for IDs that got assigned to new things. I've done it before without obvious issues, but that's the risk really- sometimes issues don't show up until much later.
In short, be cautious.

Most photos are stored in the TravelDB, so they should be safe from that culling. This package can get bulky over time, though- but you can manually clean it out using S3PE. Any _IMG can be previewed and deleted if it's something you don't need anymore- if the photo still exists somewhere ingame it will simply turn blank.