[quote=Eolath]That's really interesting and somewhat hopeful, Chris. If you have any save files that are under 7mb, could you tell us if those are also filled with ceramic pots and brutes knives or if it is just in the bloated saves? [/quote]
All of my manual saves and quicksaves are over 7MB. The autosaves are smaller and interestingly, they only have a handful of ceramic pots and brute's knives instead of tens of thousands.
It does look like there is some sort of item duplication that occurs in the levelcache, but maybe the autosave has a different/abbreviated format leaving out that junk.
An experiment to try, load up your latest autosave and see if it has the same freezing problems. Either way, there is a bug in the game and the save file growth is just a symptom of that. i.e. there is nothing we can do for now except temporarily delay the problem.
I am tempted to write a program to parse and fixup the levelcache, but without knowing what is causing the problem, that seems too dangerous.
