The vendored Sophie preset and the running debbzoid world had drifted, and the
repo only held the preset. That is not a restore point: force-pushing it would
have reverted the admins' in-game tuning rather than recovering it, which is
exactly how a Sophie world quietly became an Apocalypse one once already -- 139
values reverted, loot from 0.35 back to 0.9, CharacterFreePoints 0 to 60.
files/zomboid/sophie/SandboxVars.lua is now a snapshot of the live world taken
2026-08-31, not the preset as shipped. The modlist is untouched and still
upstream, which is why zomboid_preset_version now names the two halves and their
separate dates. server.ini.j2 carries the eight keys that had drifted:
PlayerSafehouse false -> true
SafehouseAllowNonResidential false -> true (the diner/gas-station case)
SafehouseAllowRespawn false -> true
SafehouseAllowLoot true -> false
SafehouseAllowFire true -> false
TrashDeleteAll false -> true
MapRemotePlayerVisibility 1 -> 4
ResetID 6953472 -> 826046
ResetID is in that list on purpose, and matters most. It is the world's
soft-reset token: a file value that differs from the one the live world was
created with tells every connected client to roll a new character. Carrying the
live value makes a deliberate force-push a no-op instead of a server-wide wipe
prompt.
Spawn config gets its own switch, zomboid_spawn_force. spawnregions.lua and
spawnpoints.lua are the only config a running world re-reads -- at every server
start, where SandboxVars is read once, when the world is created -- so a spawn
edit is deployable on the live world without a wipe. Sharing zomboid_config_force
between them would have meant force-pushing the whole preset to land a one-line
spawn edit, rewriting the INI (hence the ResetID hazard above) and the world's
SandboxVars along with it.
config-template/ now tracks the repo unconditionally. Nothing on the host writes
that directory and the server cannot see it, so it has no hand edits to protect;
if it does not track the repo it is not a restore point, just an older world's
settings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016QdWYhwUtwM2NQGukiRh12
Reverts the restore-from-template behaviour. A wipe now resets the world and the
player database only; Server/<name>_{SandboxVars,spawnregions,spawnpoints}.lua
carry over untouched, so hand tuning survives it. Verified by checksum: all three
files byte-identical either side of a wipe.
That gives up the guarantee the restore bought. PZ writes the running world's
settings back over those files, so if a world is ever created with defaults the
file inherits them and later wipes regenerate from them -- which is how a Sophie
world became an Apocalypse one. Nothing corrects that automatically now, so the
wipe takes a snapshot of the settings before it starts, keeping the last ten
under config-backup/. Greg's edits were lost once because the only record of them
was a file the server had since overwritten; that is the hole this fills.
config-template/ still holds the pristine Sophie preset to copy back from.
The snapshot is best-effort throughout. The first version of it created the
directory with plain mkdir, the parent belongs to the container's subuid rather
than the podman user, and set -e turned that into a failed wipe -- the same shape
as the tee that broke this script before. Ansible owns the directory now and
every step of the snapshot tolerates failure, because a backup that cannot be
written is not a reason to refuse to wipe.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A wipe was quietly turning a Sophie world into an Apocalypse one. 139 sandbox
values had reverted -- loot rates from 0.35 back to 0.9, ranged weapons and ammo
to 2.0, CharacterFreePoints from 0 to 60 -- and ten of Sophie's mod-added
options had vanished entirely.
The reset script was not deleting the settings. PZ reads
Server/<name>_SandboxVars.lua only when it creates a world, and then writes the
running world's settings back over that same file. The file is an output, not an
input. So once any world came up with defaults, the server stamped those defaults
into the file, and every wipe afterwards regenerated from them -- inheriting the
corruption rather than causing it, and with no way back out on its own. The same
shape as the admin-password deadlock.
The intended settings now live in config-template/, which the server has no
reason to touch, and a wipe restores Server/<name>_{SandboxVars,spawnregions,
spawnpoints}.lua from there before restarting. That is also the file to hand-edit
when changing the world: edit the template, wipe, and the new world has the edits.
Verified by wiping: 139 differences before, 0 after. The server still rewrites
the live file on boot -- 996 keys become 1061 as it adds newer options -- but
every Sophie value survives that now.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The reset script died on its very first line. log() piped through tee into
zomboid/logs/world-reset.log, that directory was owned by the container's
subuid, and the script runs as the podman user -- so tee returned EACCES and
set -e killed the run before it stopped the server or touched a save. Every
`@bot` reset since had been a no-op that reported nothing.
Nothing mounts zomboid/logs into a container; it only holds output from
host-side helpers running as the podman user, so it is now owned by that user
rather than by the subuid the container volumes need.
log() no longer treats the file as load-bearing either. stdout is already
captured by the journal, so an unwritable log is worth continuing past rather
than aborting a wipe over.
Verified end to end by writing the trigger exactly as the bot does: server
stopped, saves and player database deleted, service restarted.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The deployment had drifted badly. It was pinned to the Steam `-beta unstable`
branch, which stopped being right the moment B42 became the default at 42.20,
and it wrote every mod ID with the `\` prefix that B42 required only during
that unstable period and now rejects. Three server profiles were carried
around (vanilla, modded, b42revamp) whose mod lists were hand-curated blobs
from a Steam collection that has since moved on.
Moves to the Sophie 42 community preset, vendored from GerDeathstar/sophie-pz
("Sophie 42 Files.zip", 2026-07-31 == the b42 release tag): 283 mod IDs, 256
workshop items, map_distanciado over Muldraugh, plus its SandboxVars,
spawnregions and spawnpoints. Sophie's gameplay settings are kept exactly as
shipped -- PVP with its damage modifiers, the safety system, MaxPlayers=32,
PauseEmpty, no sleep, safehouses off. Only the keys this deployment actually
owns are templated over the top.
The modlist is stored as YAML lists rather than the INI's semicolon blobs, so
the next Sophie update produces a diff you can read. Exclusions live in
zomboid_mods_excluded with a reason each, seeded with IconsInventory -- already
absent upstream, listed so a re-vendor cannot quietly bring it back.
Config is now seeded before first boot instead of patched after it. The old
approach could not write the INI until the server had generated one, so every
setting went through lineinfile guarded on a stat; seeding the whole file from
the preset removes the chicken-and-egg and puts the config in git. force is
off by design: these files are a starting point, not managed state, so the
server can be stopped, hand-edited and regenerated without Ansible clobbering
the edits. Push them again deliberately with -e zomboid_config_force=true.
The B41 Discord keys were dead. B42 replaced DiscordChannel/DiscordChannelID
with DiscordChatChannel, which takes a channel name rather than a snowflake,
so the DiscordChannelID=... this role had been appending was a key the server
ignores and the chat bridge has not been working.
Renaming the server to debbzoid is what starts the new world: PZ derives the
INI, save directory and player DB from the name, so gregboid stays on disk
untouched as a rollback.
Re-enabled, because the reason it was off is now fixed. It was disabled for
saturating the SSD -- ~10 MB/s of log writes into the shared journal, which
starved Gitea CI badly enough to stretch a firmware build to 17 minutes. The
container now logs to its own rotating k8s-file instead of the journal every
other service shares, and logrotate caps the server's own server-console.txt
and Logs/ at 100M keeping 3. copytruncate is mandatory there: PZ holds those
fds for its whole life, so a rename would leave it writing into an unlinked
inode. Memory is unchanged; idle draw is nowhere near MAX_RAM.
Also stops the entrypoint recursively chowning the install tree on every boot.
With 256 workshop mods that is a large inode walk and pure churn once the
first run has set ownership.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Deploy systemd path unit that watches for trigger file from Discord
bot and executes world reset script to delete saves and restart server.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
