Importing is Causing Mass NPC Disappearances.

[Teralitha]

I had created a topic about it on steam:

Importing may be causing mass NPC disappearances.
I have done a number of imports with my current army, mainly because I am trying to get the rarest resources for farming in the game to get restocked at the stores.. hemp.

As I travel from town to town re checking stores for these elusive items and doing imports hoping to get some to spawn, I am seeing entire NPC groups disappear from the towns.

Rebirth - Completely empty.
Blister Hill - All town guards missing. All shop owners missing. Only a couple bars remain and 1 temple priest group.
Stack - Building roles shuffled about, weapon store gone and repurposed.

What I have observed from doing these imports, is that some times the buildings and their roles are shuffled around in towns. A bar will become a power station, or a barracks will become a bar, for example. I suspect during these shufflings, that when a building like a merchant gets replaced with something like a power station, that npc is gone for good, even if another import brought the store back. Same thing with barracks. If a barracks becomes a bar... no more town guards. have probably done an import about a dozen times with this game. I did one more import after the .92 update. Didnt fix it.

This situation has pretty much ruined my current game. I would have to start a new game and never do any imports to prevent this from happening again.

Just to check things off the list -
I have verified cache
fixed buildings
did more imports.

Next thing I will do is start a new game. But Im pretty confident that will reset everything.

Save game file is too big to post on here

[Drag00ne]

Yes this is happening to me too. My problem is I just started a new game already. I imported from 91.19 to 92.0.

[SivarTechie]

I can confirm that this is happening to me as well. I started with a Retired Captain game, imported it over the last few versions, and ever since, Hub's bartenders have disappeared.

To verify this, I created a new game, Retired Captain again, and checked the bar, and in the new game, the bartenders were present.

Please note: Mongrel also has several merchants missing. As I am playing the Retired Captain game, I've not been able to verify Holy Nation locations.

[Berzerker Jay]

I hate to say it because I know it makes me a bad tester and I enjoy contributing to this game, but I've stopped importing because of the bugs. I start a new game with every major update, but then a lot of the testing I've done has been around different sorts of starts and professions so I guess that's worked.

Still, I'd like to import some of my old games. There've been some good plays.

[Hatsune_Neko]

not importing can cause bugs.

[Berzerker Jay]

I just abandon the play-through. Right now I find the bugs associated with importing distracting when trying to find the latest bugs in a version, so I just start over. The alternative is having to start a new game just to make sure a bug is associated with the changes and not with the import.

To a degree those import bugs are recognized, but better to rule them out. Hope the import bugs are fixed soon.

[Teralitha]

There is a workaround... after you do an import, go to the kenshi save game folder, and then the zone folder, and delete all zones and tiles except for your own outpost zone. if you delete that your outpost will disappear. Its best to identify what zone/tiles your outpost is in and delete everything else in the folder. It will reset the map after doing the import, but without the missing npcs. If you are nto sure about doing this, just create another save. Doing this only affects the save file you did it to. If you delete your outpost by mistake, you can reload a different save.

it sounds like what the import function is supposed to do, but its bugged up somehow. You can also just delete the town zones that are missing npc's So all your old save games you liked, can still be resurrected!

[TheCometCE]

There is a workaround... after you do an import, go to the kenshi save game folder, and then the zone folder, and delete all zones and tiles except for your own outpost zone. if you delete that your outpost will disappear. Its best to identify what zone/tiles your outpost is in and delete everything else in the folder. It will reset the map after doing the import, but without the missing npcs. If you are nto sure about doing this, just create another save. Doing this only affects the save file you did it to. If you delete your outpost by mistake, you can reload a different save.

it sounds like what the import function is supposed to do, but its bugged up somehow. You can also just delete the town zones that are missing npc's So all your old save games you liked, can still be resurrected!

Clever workaround there, how do I go about looking up what zone I'm in? Or is it just the largest file?

[Teralitha]

I think in the main kenshi folder is a file called "Havok.log" If you go stand in the broken town, save then reload your game, look at the havok.log and it will show you which zones/tiles were loaded up. Go and delete those. It will show a 3x3 area around where you loaded up. So you should see 9 coordinates loaded. Just delete them, both the zones and the tiles with the same coordinates for that save game only, then reload the save again and the town should be fixed.

You can also look at this map - http://i.imgur.com/dJ2arKX.jpg and count the squares to figure it out. The top left corner should be 0.0. Left to right I believe is the first number, top to bottom is the second.

Blister hill should be about zone 23,23, also tile 23,23. Delete those 2 and it should fix blister hill next time you load.

[SivarTechie]

I just did a quick test, because your workaround gave me an idea, and it looks like that issue only occurs when you import buildings.

I did a fresh import from my saved game, and didn't import the buildings or the research, just the squads and whatever they had on them, and the NPCs were there when I went into Hub.

Figured that I would offer this to help with the debugging/fixing process.

[Teralitha]

Yea that is probably the reason why. If the devs have read about this, they will know.

[Teralitha]

Just to update, Im now seeing double signage on shops when importing in a town and reloading game. it would seem that even if you delete zone/tile files that the old data is being stored somewhere else and corrupting the new data. Old shop signs are not being deleted. Ive even seen bar signs with general store signs on the same building. But the building will be empty. This happened in Mongrel.

Just a suggestion, you should probably remove the import function. I dont think you will ever be able fix whatever importing breaks because of the randomness. Its better if imports werent allowed. People can just make new games. Its a beta after all...

[Drag00ne]

Just to update, Im now seeing double signage on shops when importing in a town and reloading game. it would seem that even if you delete zone/tile files that the old data is being stored somewhere else and corrupting the new data. Old shop signs are not being deleted. Ive even seen bar signs with general store signs on the same building. But the building will be empty. This happened in Mongrel.

Just a suggestion, you should probably remove the import function. I dont think you will ever be able fix whatever importing breaks because of the randomness. Its better if imports werent allowed. People can just make new games. Its a beta after all...

Double signs are not related to importing your game. I seen them in a fresh start too.

[reaper1583]

1. yeah I'm starting to have this problem too and while following this guide (in a small way) I noticed that my tile23,23 file was there and my zone23,23 was not so I deleted the tile file an will test to see what happens. hope this works like I think it would

2. first test didn't work I imported my buildings so now I will try to import without buildings (really don't want to rebuild my base but bug testing in this region is majorly dangerous so new base new location)

3. second test worked with unexpected results. I only deleted the file to Blister Hill and importing without buildings and my result was it is safe to import your research, Blister Hill now has ALL it's npcs and unexpectedly the town of Bad Teeth that was also having the same issue received ALL it's npcs and I did not delete it's files in any way. Looking at this it's safe to assume that the mass disappearance is tied to importing our buildings

so anyone reading this I recommend you load up your people and/or animals with anything important or will need from your base and save your game then import without buildings that will fix it but you will have to start building your base over again. You CAN KEEP importing your research it did not affect this in anyway so those people with high level research (my self included) can breath easy about that.