Elite Dangerous is dealing with a nasty save bug on the eve of the launch for Horizons, its next expansion.
The bug came up while they were upgrading the server for Exploration. This part of the game rewards players with in-game cash for scanning planets, and selling those scans at space stations. The database held as much as 67 million lines of data, and after the upgrade, storing and retrieving this data was going to become much easier.
The bug came up sometime between Wednesday and Friday, and basically it stopped more exploration data from being saved. It is not known at this time if the data can be retrieved, but developer Frontier is already telling their players to stop exploring momentarily.
When Horizon does release, it will allow players to use a dune buggy to explore the planets they find. Most of these planets will be barren, and even atmosphere less, but the procedural generation algorithm will create earth like atmospheres that should make the buggy and other exploration tools useful. Along with this, players will get to use muticrew ships, a new character creator, and more.
Elite Dangerous Horizons is coming holiday 2015.