NullReferenceException :/

Like everyone I’m loving the new DLC - I play vanilla, commitment mode, Cassandra blood & dust, all the expansions but no mods. This playthrough I created a custom genotype mechinator starting on the coldest iceberg, (this has been my favourite start ever - can’t recommend it enough,) in a cold, cold world. Did some mild Dev Mode tweaks (skills/passion editing, immediate fishing research, spawned a penguin, adjusted the genes a bit,) but haven’t done anything else since I started the actual run about 2 in-game years ago. Things are going great, slowly building up resources, my starting pawn now has a companion and they are engaged, grav ship starting to take form, etc, when some poor bloke with paralytic abrasia crashes his transport pod on the other side of the iceberg and begs me to take care of him. The harsh reality is that it’s -70C, he’s geared for max -16C, and it’s unlikely I can even navigate out of the base and around the iceberg in time to save him. Quick prayer and may his biomass fuel our chemfuel thrusters amongst the stars. The 24hr quest timer starts ticking down and, unbeknownst to me, it marks the beginning of the end. I’m about to click and deny his joining when I had a thought I wish I didn’t. What if I simply let the cold take him before the 24hr timer runs out? Then I won’t need to deal with the debuff. Boy was I wrong. The next day my pawns sleep for almost 24h. I’m looking at their tabs trying to figure if they got some sleeping sickness… it turns out all of their needs are now locked and can no longer view specific things on that tab (ie mood buffs, debuffs). I open the debugger log and it’s justrepeating instances of the NullReferenceException bug. I googled around - I figure how to regenerate the single, old autosave file stored in commitment mode but unfortunately it’s still in a post bug world so there are no previous saves to fall back on. I’ve tried Dev Mode and reanimating the quest pawn, deleting the quest, and 8 million other things in the extensive debug menu but can’t figure anything out (been alt F4ing out after trying a few things to not further corrupt the file). If anyone has any ideas on how to salvage this I would love to hear them