Really this is a problem. I hit escape key and most of the time the save feature isn't there. Is there a phase I have to wait for? Explain.

Understood.

So it's not just me! I've had this as well.

For reasons unknown - or possibly completely flukey - if you go to the controls and click on the clock when it's in the GUARD phase (so it transports you to the bed), and then select the bed, I've found I never get this skipping. However if I manually wander over to the bed during the guard phase and sleep, then occasionally this happens.

Like I said, could be coincidence - but so far I've avoided the freaky skip by doing that.

I'll pay more attention on how I go to bed then. Juggle between hitting tab to walking to bed my case.

Actually scratch what I said earlier - just recently had the lottery phase skip even after I did what I wrote above.

So it's possibly just random. The only other thing I can think of is to make sure all messages are read from the message tubes - but that's just pure speculation again.

This once really drove me nuts because it decided the skip the lottery phase on a day I was due to arrive at a scavenging location - so when I went to scavenge I had NO people to do it with! The game then just said "scavenging disabled - train in motion" even though it was stationary! I ended up just force quitting the game and then reloading (which loaded from when the last lottery phase should have been - the one I missed. Turns out the game auto-saves every lottery phase anyway apparently).