the rookie adventurer has been saved. I do recall him mentioning something about a certain place surrounded by slime. But have yet to find that location. There is that one rune that I cannot pass due to paralysis. I'm currently level 9. I have gone through the forest multiple times now but nothing really stood out to me. Unless that rescue can expire? Then i might have missed it. Otherwise I might go look for him. Also once you leave the forest. A certain key item loses power. Is that also permanent once you have left the forest? Can that item be recharged somewhere?
You pretty much answered all your own questions! Yes, you need to rescue the rookie, get that item he gives you, and you need to use it to pass the 'paralysis' thing.
And yes, that item does expire when you leave the forest, so you need to do it before leaving. And yes, there's a way to 'recharge' that item too.
I've already started a new game where I did dispel the rune and gotten the fireball spell. I'll just have to use that file then. If the fire spell really is that useful later on. Otherwise I'm currently travelling south in pursuit of the other travellers. Fighting slugs now. But I'm running in error readings a lot more often now.
Ah, that's because you're playing the game out of a OneDrive location, or you have some kind of cloudsync settings that are trying to make the game save / load to a OneDrive folder.
Due to the nature of OneDrive, it can cause the "persistent.rpgsave" to get desynchronised from the rest of the game. This file is constantly being checked / updated / referred to during the playing of the game and if it doesn't properly match the game's current state it will cause this error.
Anyway, the simple fix is to check where you have our game saved. If it's in your OneDrive folder, please move it out of there. If you have a setting where your files and folders are automatically synced to OneDrive, you'll want to disable that specifically for Grove.