u/Environmental_Loan50

Two nights in a row, my game server crashed. Then the admin page went down too. I finally traced it to one missing punctuation mark — copied 186 times across the database.

Here's what happened, for anyone who likes a good bug story.

Somewhere in the tooling I use to add items to the game, stat bonuses were getting saved in the wrong format. Instead of proper JSON like "strength": 2 with quotes around the key, they were stored the way I'd write it in my code — strength: 2, no quotes.

Small difference, big consequence. The code that reads that data can't parse the unquoted version, so every time the game loaded one of those items, it quietly gave up and acted like the item had no bonuses at all. People were running around in gear that did absolutely nothing, and neither they nor I had any idea.

I fixed it in two passes.

First, I stopped the crashing. I wrapped every database read so a single bad row can't take the whole server down anymore. That ended the 2am wakeups.

Then I went after the actual data, because those broken values were still sitting there, silently zeroing out everyone's gear. I wrote a repair script to find every value that failed to parse and rewrite it properly.

Here's the part that got me. I expected to fix one item. I found six. And then, because I decided to scan the rest of the database instead of calling it a day, I found 180 more broken rows with a completely different formatting problem I didn't even know I had. If I'd only patched the thing that was crashing, those would still be quietly broken right now.

The lesson I keep relearning working on this alone: when you find one instance of a data bug, assume there are more and go count. The bugs that scare me aren't the loud ones that crash the server. They're the quiet ones that fail politely and hand back a number that looks completely reasonable.

All 186 rows are fixed and verified. Gear does things again.

I've learned the hard way that a fix isn't really done until the problem can't crawl back...I hope.

The Wanderer - Wanderer's Tale

First, a bug affecting ranger players: bow damage was being calculated using Strength instead of Dexterity. Since rangers have no Strength bonus, their bows were hitting goblins for 1-2 damage per shot — even with a 4-8 damage weapon. The math was simply wrong. Bows now scale with DEX the way they always should have, and early goblin armor has been trimmed to match. Rangers should feel significantly more capable starting immediately.

Second, a Firefox-specific chat issue: town chat would silently stop working after any socket disconnect and reconnect. The server lost track of who was in the chat room, dropped every message without any error, and gave players no indication anything was wrong. It now reconnects properly, and if something does go sideways you'll see a message explaining why instead of just... nothing.

Thanks to telyni for reporting both. Detailed bug reports with steps, screenshots, and browser info make these fixable. Keep them coming.

The Wanderer - Wanderer's Tale

So. About that.

Last night the server went down again. Same crash, same root cause, different spot in the code. Turns out the hotfix I pushed after night one only covered the places I knew to look — and there were about 60 others I didn't.

The night one patch handled the specific JSON.parse call that had triggered the crash loop. What I hadn't accounted for was that the same pattern existed all over the codebase. Different routes, different contexts, same assumption: that every value coming out of the database would be valid JSON. One bad value anywhere was still enough to kill the process.

So tonight I stopped patching individual spots and replaced the whole approach. Every database column parse in the server now goes through a single safeJSON utility that catches any failure and returns a safe default instead of throwing. All 60-something call sites, across 9 files.

I also added global error handlers to the Node process — something that honestly should have been there from the start. Before tonight, one unhandled error anywhere in the codebase was enough to take the server down for everyone. That's no longer true.

Night one I fixed the symptom. Night two I fixed the system.

Thanks again for your patience. And sorry for the repeat.

The Wanderer - Wanderer's Tale

I get it. Most players do. Gold is gold, and an item with no obvious use is just noise in a list that keeps growing.

But every once in a while, something drops that feels a little different. A broken thing. A fragment of something larger. An object that clearly meant something to someone, even if you have no idea who.

The temptation is still there. Sell it. Move on. You've got a dungeon to clear.

Some players do. Some players don't.

I'm not going to tell you which choice is right. I'm not going to tell you what any of it means. That's kind of the whole point.

If something drops and you find yourself reading the description twice — sit on it for a while before you head to the merchant.

The Wanderer - Wanderer's Tale

Hey everyone,

First off, a massive thank you to everyone who sent over a message letting me know the game was down, and thank you for your patience waiting for it to come back online. I was fast asleep when it hit the fan overnight, so it was down a lot longer than it should have been.

As it turns out, you guys took the instructions to "break things" completely literally.

For those curious about what went wrong, the server got caught in a brutal crash loop on every single inventory fetch. The root cause was the stat_bonuses column in the database; it was saving data using unquoted JS object syntax (like {intelligence:6}) instead of valid JSON string formatting. The moment the code hit JSON.parse, it threw a hard exception and brought the whole house down on every request.

I just pushed a hotfix to make the parser tolerant. It now catches those unquoted keys, automatically adds the missing quotes, and retries the parse on the fly so old data gets handled safely without touching the database directly.

The server is fully restarted and live again. See you back on the road!

The Wanderer - Wanderer's Tale

Two reports from natsulee01 today, both fixed.

First — the general store couldn't be scrolled in expanded mode. Tracked it down to a CSS height constraint that wasn't being cleared when the panel went fullscreen. Should be smooth now on all browsers.

Second — a lag spike on a slow connection let a buy button get clicked twice before the server could respond. Both requests passed the gold check using the same balance read, and the purchase went through twice. Fixed on two fronts: the button now locks the moment you click it, and the server-side deduction was rewritten as a single atomic operation so even if two requests arrive at the same time, only one can win.

Good catches. Keep them coming through the in-game report tool.

The Wanderer - Wanderer's Tale