Bay 12 Games Forum

Why have some of my raws suddenly jumped sideways?

This will be a useful tactic for future modders.

DF doesn't tend to shut down when it encounters an error, it simply keeps trying to run until it crashes and burns.  If something throws the parser out of whack, it'll keep going on its merry way, even if that means it'll start sticking materials and creatures where they shouldn't go, leading to the weirdness that happens due to duplicate raws.  I figured whatever the bug was here, it must be related somehow to this phenomenon: something that isn't listed among the illegal operations but throws the parser out of place so you get invincible bandits if you're lucky and crashes if you're not.

So I got a new idea: Instead of playing hit-or-miss and trying to find a pattern for how stable the game was, try to figure out how the game was loading the raws.  How?  Simple: deliberately introduce errors into the files and read the order they show up in the error log.  Turns out the game always loads the raws in the same order: inorganics, plants, tools, creatures, civs, and interactions, and within a type, it loads them in the order the files are arranged (alphabetically).

I couldn't figure out what was making the difference between whether the game loaded or crashed, but I did find that when it crashed, the error logs always stopped at the same creature group, no matter where they were placed.