Is there a way to Restore my Game?

[Bombadil]

I have been working on a character for about a week now.

This morning unfortunately a circuit breaker was tripped in the house and my computer shut down while I was in the middle of playing.

Is my character salvageable still?

[fizzix]

what happens when you attempt to load the character? Usually in the situation of an abnormal shut down you should be able to pick up at the last saved place, usually at the beginning of the level.

[Derakon]

Yeah, Angband is actually pretty kind about enforcing permadeath compared to some games -- instead of deleting the savefile whenever the game is loaded, and recreating it whenever you quit, the file is only "destroyed" (reduced to monster memory and a few other statistics) when the tombstone screen is displayed. As long as your filesystem's in good shape and you didn't actually die in-game, your savefile should be fine.

[fizzix]

Yeah, Angband is actually pretty kind about enforcing permadeath compared to some games -- instead of deleting the savefile whenever the game is loaded, and recreating it whenever you quit, the file is only "destroyed" (reduced to monster memory and a few other statistics) when the tombstone screen is displayed. As long as your filesystem's in good shape and you didn't actually die in-game, your savefile should be fine.

I should note that this wasn't always the case. It used to be (in version 2.something) that you needed to exit the game normally to have your savefile be workable. There was some checksum in the file that indicated that this was saved, if you exited abnormally, like with a power outage, then the savefile would not work. This was in the, "we need to prevent cheating" stage, where they wanted to avoid people unplugging their computers when something bad happened so as to not update the savefile.

So the story told to me was that back in the day there was a bug with Manticores where if they launched spikes at you it would cause the game to crash on Macs. Since the savefile wasn't exited properly, this meant that an encounter with a manticore was instant death. Fixing this bug was the motivation for Ben Harrison to start coding on Angband.

Now all those checksum things are removed, there is not prevention against save scumming or similar. The idea being that if you game the system, you're the one that loses.

[Bombadil]

Phew OK thanks guys.

I didnt want to try to start the game without checking here first.