"I'mma be real, if your PC gets a BSoD in 2024, I think you've got bigger problems than a game where you forgot to save for 4 hours. BSoDs are pretty rare these days."
That is true, but not for me. Long story short, I can't fix it by ANY means as of right now, so I just have to deal, though, see the second-to-last part of this post, as that might apply to more people than those with extremely weird problems.
Regardless, it would be nice if you were allowed to save manually, or the game at least told you how it saved your data, even without adding auto-saving.
Also, I should mention(and I mean this politely, just as a comment/piece of advice), regarding this part of your reply: "That said, the game's got SOME kind of autosave, I think it saves whenever you quit the game normally." Most people don't consider that "autosaving," as you have to DO something for it to save, eliminating the "auto" part. Furthermore, most people only consider it autosaving when it saves on a timer, or when you go through loading zones.
Now, here's the part I mentioned earlier: I have found that my save data is entirely corrupted, I cannot delete the save or create a new save. This could, in theory, happen in other scenarios, that are different from mine, and as such, might be an area that would be beneficial to look into. It does seem that I am able to fix this problem by deleting my save file manually, but there are many scenarios where someone might not be able to do that, whether they don't know how, or they play on certain hardware/software, they have certain restrictions placed on their computer, ETC.
I should mention that I took no offense to your reply. In my experience, when someone responds with a message as large and as formatted as mine, they are mad at the person they are responding to, so I am sorry if I come off that way. In fact, I feel that your message was beneficial, as I was spurred on to make this follow-up message, which, hopefully, can be used to the benefit of others who may experience, or be concerned about, similar problems to mine, and possibly can even be used to the benefit of the developer, with a combination of my suggestions and possible insight I may have given into areas of code that can be looked at.
Have a good day/night.
(Edit: fixed an error regarding message structure)