Construction Issues

Was removing roots on farm in Aurora. My own 250 slot farm. Guess server reset a couple times today. Had literally zero credit until my axe broke, equipped new axe and that started giving actions. What is this shit bug? If server resets in mid-action you have to re-equip weapon to get credit for some skills?

From the Dec 10, 2016 update notes:

I've setup phase 1 of a data watcher that makes sure that work done on buildings isn't lost. This is a backend thing that no one should ever notice or anything like that but it should make it so that on server restarts building progress isn't lost.

Is this data watcher still operational? If not, can it be brought back up? If it is, can't it be used to give us our progress back?

I would also like to add that this is a very important issue for a game like this. "Idle" games such as this one play to the human affinity for numbers that keep getting bigger, creating a sense of achievement. In games with a more active element, the sense of achievement comes from doing the actions, but here, where the main action is clicking a shape every half hour, the sense of achievement can't really come from anywhere other than the numbers going up. That means any loss of progress is detrimental to the very nature of the game. That's why there was such an outcry when aura was rebalanced and some players lost a large amount of exp. That's why this is a very important issue to resolve quickly. This is more important than new areas or quality-of-life improvements. Without those other changes, forward progress is perhaps slower and more painful, but it is still progress; with this bug, on the other hand, progress is lost - that means the countless hours staring at the screen were in vain. Like showing someone a cake, then taking it away and asking "What cake?"

In addition, its spurious nature makes it particularly frustrating, as it happens rarely enough that we're going to keep trying but often enough that we're going to get bitten by it. On the other hand, with bugs where a certain action doesn't produce items, it's unfortunate that the item cannot be made, but the action can just be avoided to avoid wasting time and resources.

It's good to hear you guys feel the same way we do. To give you an update, we've devoted several rounds to try and fix this issue. It's been the most challenging bug so far, by a healthy (or unhealthy i guess) margin. Also, just as a note of our process, rest assured that when you see new content come out, that doesn't mean it took time away from solving the bigger bug issues. Both dev's have specialties and skillsets that don't allow them to both work on everything. This is an example of that. All that being said, we think we are getting close to a solution, and plan on testing it out in the near future.