Cataclysm-dda: Death Duplication

[LokiScion]

Game version:

Operating system: windows 10

Tiles or curses: 0.C-27897-g8ce9ee5

Mods active: Dark days ahead, deadleaves' fictional guns, medieval and historic content, more survival tools, stats through skills, vehicle additions pack, tanks and other vehicles, alternative map key, bionics systems mod, boats, craftable gun pack, folding parts pack, makeshift items mod, more buildings, more locations, disable npc needs, disable religious texts, simplified nutrition, extended realistic guns, mining mod, mutant npcs, beta national guard camp, classes and scenarios mod, classic roguelike classes.

Expected behavior

when quicksaving and you die and exit the game to replay from that quicksave you expect it all to be revert to that save time.

Actual behavior

if you wait till you get the grave popup you can then close the game and replay the save. your character will still be in the same spot, but you will have a corpse (where you died to get this to happen) that you can loot.

Steps to reproduce the behavior

quicksave. move tiles (i don't know if this is nessacarry) kill yourself by some means, wait till the ASCII grave pops up with your info. alt tab. close the game. reload save. done you now have duped all of your gear.

[FulcrumA]

That's not really a bug, that's you exploiting things with forcefully quitting the game to later play as a character that should be dead. Get back to the menu the way you should, by just getting past the grave screen and summary and there will be no such bug.

I guess one could just switch a few lines of code around to have the save be deleted immediately upon character's death, but that's about it.

[Theundyingcode]

I'm fairly certain that the expected behavior should be:
When trying to revert to a quick save after dying you find the save file is gone as the devs have stated very clearly that cdda will never support save scumming.

That said, possible item cloning exploit is indeed a valid and serious issue. Possible fix suggestion: add bool has_died to player and save it as true as soon as they get killed. Upon load, if it's true immediately kill the player.

[FulcrumA]

@Theundyingcode

Possible fix suggestion: add bool has_died to player and save it as true as soon as they get killed. Upon load, if it's true immediately kill the player.

I'd reckon by then there should be no save beside that one kept in the world for debugging purposes. CDDA doesn't and shouldn't support savescumming but adding additional functions to the save won't prevent it (since if someone saved the save elsewhere, they will overwrite it) and in general, if someone's a cheater, trying to fix and prevent every way one's cheating is a fool's errand. Especially since debug is available to everyone anyway.

[Szara-ManOfHonor]

Alt f4 when you get the 'watch the last moments of your life' and the last save will be whatever save you made, no corpse, etc.
There's no plans to make anti-savescum methods is all I've ever heard. The save on death is so that subsequent characters in the same world can find that corpse.

[DoctorGoat]

There's a lot of ways to abuse current save/load/death mechanics. Here's one!

Start a bionic assassin in an evac shelter. Go to the nearest city. Get every book you can, some codeine, and find either a butcher's knife or another knife with high butchering. A scalpel is probably a good idea, too. Return to the shelter, kill the NPC if there is one, and then suicide.

Now start every bionic class/class with good items you can, kill the NPC, and die. Bionic firefighter would be a good idea to do quite a few times. If you notice you're not spawning in the same evac shelter often, reset the world and try again.

Then start a survivalist. You're going to need at least four points of disadvantages, but you're going to be going for 10 Survival unless you found books to get close to that. If you have the books to get from 0 to >7 survival, you don't need a survivalist and would be better suited as a medical resident with pumped up electronics/first aid.

Quicksave, butcher one of your many alter-egos, alt-f4 if it's not the bionics you want from it. Repeat, repeat, repeat. When you're done and are standing in front of a parallel universe war crime, install all the bionics you can (you can savescum here, too)

https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/blob/master/data/json/professions.json You can get as many of anything in this json file as you want doing this.

After this, you'll have enough bionics to go toe-to-toe with a dozen hulks at the same time, nice gear, and things like big piles of carbon fiber arrows. If you're a cannibal, you can also make enough jerk jerky to last you for a long, long time.

What have you actually accomplished? You've spent like.. four hours playing with exploiting a game mechanic to get about five minutes worth of debug menu activity with about the same legitimacy. Are you affecting other people's saves/games? Nope.

Would there be a way to fix this without being hamhanded and messing up current mechanics? Probably not. Should anyone bother trying? Not really.

[BevapDin]

Not a bug. And a known issue, you can even find it by searching for "save" "scumming": #12602 - there are more issues for that.