I have no idea why, but hitting "continue" made me load up a save from really really long ago. I am about 8 tedious radio towers back, 3 hours of story, and about 6 camps behind where I was. It then decides to auto-save before I realise this, effectively deleting my auto-save from my way-far ahead game. I was really enjoying this game, but I hate being forced to do shit twice, and this is a HUGE downer on the whole experience. Anyone else have that problem and have any kind of solution of how to fix or prevent it?

Save in the open world, save after crafting. 

@warxsnake: I did. In fact, the reason this seems to have taken me back this far is because I manually saved. It's as if the auto-save is jealous of my ability to navigate the menu.

I have lots of other games to play, which is why this worries me. I like this game a lot, and now I am so bummed out, I might just move on to something else and this will remain on my back burner for a long while. I should probably just swallow this negativity and just blast my way back up to speed, and make sure not to trust the "continue" button ever again. Load manually.

I try to never use the Continue button for that exact reason. Multiple games have screwed me that way.