Dawnsbury Days 4.42 (item duplication hotfix)

Yesterday, patch 4.40 introduced a game-breaking bug that caused all items in your hands and backpack to duplicate after every encounter. I am extremely sorry for this bug. Unlike bugs that merely cause a crash, this one filled your inventory with extra items, which is not just annoying but also upsets game balance in a way you can't easily fix.

Fix

This patch attempts to fix the situation as best I can.

First, items will no longer duplicate each encounter. If you notice that something is still duplicating sometimes, please let me know.

Second, the game will attempt to "fix" any saves made between the time the 4.40 patch went live and the end of today (September 17 — September 18) when you first load them again. All duplicated items in your inventory will be stashed off into a special "duplicated items" bag of holding, leaving you hopefully with your original inventory, or at least something very close to it.

If you originally genuinely possessed duplicates of an item, you can draw the duplicated back into your inventory from the newly spawned bag of holding.

When you think that your inventory looks like it should, you can right-click the new bag of holding and click "Destroy this" to delete the duplicated items forever.

I recommend making a manual save file now, before you make further changes, so that you can come back to it if necessary.

If the fix doesn't quite work for you, I would appreciate reports on that as well.

Analysis

Again, I am really really sorry for this bug. I appreciate your swift and precise bug reports and the kindness I saw in your comments despite the fact that the bug prevented you from continuing the game.

This bug came in because I attempted to fix a situation where an item stolen by a nalfeshnee (a high-level demon who appears in The Four-Leaf Clover expansion) would be removed from your inventory forever. The nalfeshnee didn't give it back when it died. I resolved this by causing monsters and NPCs to drop their inventory on death so that the game would collect it and place it back in your inventory, but I accidentally also caused all heroes to drop all their items as well, which caused the duplication to happen.

This part of the code comes from early on in the life of Dawnsbury Days and is admittedly of less code quality than what I would like and a mistake like this is easy to make there. The transition between "campaign mode" and "in-battle mode" has been the source of bugs before, too.

Many game-breaking bugs are caught by automated testing, but that automated testing only applies to in-battle mode and I have no automated testing set up for menu and campaign mode interactions, and thus this slipped.

I do keep new builds on experimental branch for a time, but few players play on the experimental branch (and if they do, they often play Free encounter mode), so we didn't catch it this way here either.

I still should be more careful about releasing new builds. It was definitely a mistake to release a major patch during the Party-Based RPG Steam Fest when there are more players playing Dawnsbury Days than ever in 2026. I needed to release a hotfix and instead decided to release the full patch, which was sloppy and shouldn't have been done. Sorry!

Thank you for your understanding.