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
