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[morikal]

So I have a system for keeping track of dwarves whose custom profession changes a lot. I like to name my soldiers by the primary weapon they will end up using (so I can keep track of marksdwarves who are just temporarily training unarmed, or training hammer, and so on). All my soldiers in training I had nicknamed "Soldja". They were miners.

At either my first or second ambush (don't recall which), I noticed something odd: one of my "Soldja" dwarves (who had only mining enabled, and a custom profession "Miner D") was listed in the "units" screen as an invader! I checked with Dwarf Manager, and indeed one of my 9 training miners was gone (DM only showed . I zoomed over to the unit listed as an invader (along with a bunch of goblins). He was displayed as the @ symbol or whatever which you normally see the trading liasons as. I couldn't get at any of his skills, inventory, labors, or anything--it was as if he were a goblin. He was out in front of the rest of the goblins, and they were all moving together.

Well, I called out my military to deal with the ambush, and they shot him full of bolts! (They also killed some of the goblins). I got a message saying he bled to death (I think... might be mis-remembering that part).

After this, I noticed that when an ambush happens, my dwarves nicknames also get erased or screwed up occasionally... for example, I had 3 dwarves in a squad, all nicknamed "Marks" for marksdwarf... after they dealt with an ambush, they all had survived, but one of them no longer had a nickname (and yes, it was definately the same dwarf--all the same skills and settings for weapons, etc). Another time the nickname changed to "Soldja" from "Marks". (And yes, I'm positive I hadn't forgotten to update the nickname when transferring a soldier from citizen-trainee to military dwarf--I always change the nickname before putting a dwarf into a military squad.)

A few other observations:
 - Not sure if any children had been snatched, but if so, I certainly hadn't nicknamed any of them. And that wouldn't account for me having 9 miner dwarves (all nicknamed Soldja or SiegeOp), then suddenly 8 miner dwarves (with a Soldja missing), and a nicknamed dwarf leading a goblin ambush...
 - The "mindwashed" dwarf had no injuries at all until my soldiers got to him.
 - The "mindwashed" dwarf had all his equipment on him after my soldiers killed him.
 - This "mindwashing" thing has happened at least twice now (my fort is just starting its 3rd year I think), out of maybe 7 ambushes.

[Sowelu]

Have you ever terminated the game with ctrl-alt-del, the X button, or yanking the power, etc.?

If you do that, it can screw up the data for units living outside your fort.  I haven't seen it express itself like this--normally it just crashes--but that would be my guess.

If that ever happens you should restore from backup, always, because it only screws you down the line...

[morikal]

I have killed DF before via cntrl-alt-delete, usually if I screwed something up and want to reload from the last save.

Are you saying that the game is writing to the save files (or perhaps the region files, or something) in between saves, and thus any non-local exit will corrupt the current fort in odd ways?

I don't THINK I've been non-locally exiting very often from DF (but I haven't really kept track). But, during a long (8+ hour) play session, I noticed this ambush mindwashing/nickname erasing behavior...

Do I need to start a brand new fort to fix this then? And anytime DF dies without exiting normally, I need to clear out the entire save folder and replace with a backup?

[Enzo]

It's shaky. Once you've used ctr-alt-delete (or whatever) to exit DF you could get a nemesis error at any time, making your fort unplayable. It could break your fort tomorrow, or in a month (even if you only exit properly from now on), or never.
If you must fiddle around in a fort without saving, copy the folder and play out of the copy.

Yeah, I know, it's a bummer. I got rid of a recent fort out of sheer nemesis paranoia.

[Sowelu]

Not just the fort, the whole region.

You don't need to nuke the whole save folder, just the region you were playing in.

This was a much bigger problem in the 2d version, but it's still an issue for some people today.  The problem as I understand it is, data for off-map hist figs is not saved in the same way as data for the rest of the world.  So people will get out of sync or disappear completely from histories, which--I've never seen happen before you, but I'm guessing--can cause them to sometimes be replaced with your own guys.

Most commonly, when this happens, it's a crash when merchants show up (because the liaison doesn't exist anymore or something).

[morikal]

Well, damn.

I guess I'll either start a new fort, or just wait until the next version comes out... shouldn't be TOO much longer, right? hehe

[morikal]

Given Toady One's answer in reply #13 of this thread: http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=34296.msg524242#msg524242, I am now wondering whether it really was my using the OS to kill a running DF...

I never kill it while it is saving & synchronizing...