Well, the save file is corrupted.
In most cases i am not willing to fix save files that show signs of more than 1 corruption inside but this was quite weird due to how many things were absurdly off.
So the crash you see is caused by trying to load tiles data for a chunk [-21,9] on gleba, however that is not the root cause.
Tiles data are simply one of the first pieces of data to load for a given chunk and the corruption starts on a chunk before it, at chunk[-21,8] on gleba. On this chunk there is gleba-spawner-small at position {-653.937, 261.812} (unit number 1925864). Here was the first corruption i was unable to explain: there are two extra "0" bytes present inside of save file right after this entity. They had absolutely no reason for being here as right after them there was another entity present and enemy spwner had no more data to save. I do not know if this was some type of zip corruption triggered by cpu fault or bit flip, if there would be 2 extra bytes inserted then save file would have not well formed parts of level.dat as one of them would be 2 bytes larger than an exact megabyte and yet all of them were correct so i suspect the corruption happened while saving. Anyway i decided to get rid of those 2 bytes and rest of the save file was deserialised correctly.
But it was not fixed yet. Targeters seem to be corrupted here. One of the spider units was pointing at a corpse of medium-demolisher-trail-upper ({-647.895, 261.813} on gleba. How the hell is there a demolisher corpse on gleba??). I looked at the targetables nearby and found that this medium-demolisher-trail-upper (targetable 1206673) was right before a small-strafer-pentapod-leg (targetable 1206674). So i decided to reattach this targeter to the small-strafer-pentapod-leg. And finally the game loaded.
But it then immediately crashed on a consistency check. Issue was that this medium-demolisher-trail-upper (which is a Corpse) was corrupted. Updatable entities are usually in one of 6 possible modes, however this entity was reporting as being in mode "96". I decided to fix this updatable entity by making it inactive which required... to change 2 bytes into "0". This is really suspicious because this issue was within 50 bytes of the previous 2 bytes i had to remove.
And finally, the save file managed to load and consistency seems to be passing.
I decided to look what happened on the gleba:
And here it is, Medium demolisher trail on gleba. I have no idea what is it doing here. I also have no clue how is it possible that the strafer on the bottom has only 4 legs when the prototype says it should have 5 legs.
I think i will have to stop fixing people's save files because recently that gave absolutely no insight into any bug in the game itself, all of them seem to be some types of cpu or ram corruptions and we work on an assumption that 2+2=4 and if cpu says that its not then it is not our fault if save file becomes corrupted.
