Hullo, chaps.
So, I might have found a bug that forces a crash but I'm still testing it and am growing more suspicious that it might be "melting socks". I'm not really familiar with said bug, however, so I thought it better to check here to be sure; I've checked the bug tracker and bugs forum for more information, but I'm still a little in the dark as to the specifics of this... bug... so please bear with me.
The game crashes with no internal message and no error log some time in early winter. I have a metalsmith happily melting lots of copper, silver and iron arrows that the goblin bowmen who murdered the fort's previous occupants forgot to take with them when they left. These arrows have been dropped in a bin in a stockpile not far from the magma smelter, needless to say I have been keeping a close eye on this dwarf and monitoring everything he has taken to the smelter since I heard about the unmeltable bug. On my last try, he got thirsty and I took the melt job off repeat. He finishes melting an iron arrow, then goes to the dining hall for a quick one. Everything is hunky-dory. While nobody is in danger of melting any damn socks, I check on the rest of my dwarves, and come back later to find my metalsmith idle in the meeting hall, some distance from my metalworking area. Fine. I create a new melting job at the smelter, back out, unpause the game (and I may have fiddled with a few other workshops and the military screen before unpausing, but nothing major?) and watch it suddenly crash.
So, what gives? I was labouring under the impression that the melting bug caused a crash only when a dwarf took a [sock, or unmeltable whatever] to the smelter and actually tried to melt it, and my metalsmith was nowhere near the smelter at the time of the crash, although he may have just activated a job to haul an unmeltable item to the shop. Does this corellate with the accepted behaviour of said bug? If so, is there any workaround (other than never creating any more melt jobs)? I'd really like to get past the first year of this fort some time.
Oh, and I've started seeing the crash-on-cleaning-objects bug. Tallies with other reports of this bug, but occurs 100% of the time on saving manually (but this is less concerning than the other crash as it doesn't break the game, as far as I can tell).
Cheers.