Editing Openai/696e303b-9f9c-8001-b1df-6fcfc3f35a2c (section)

=== Assistant: Not weird at all, actually. ===
Not weird at all, actually. It feels weird, but it’s textbook delayed-failure behavior. RimWorld didn’t forgive you — it just hadn’t noticed yet.

Here’s the mental model that makes it click.

When you removed Pawnmorpher and HAR, you didn’t blow up the save. You created dangling references. Think of them like dead hyperlinks in a book: harmless until you try to turn to that page.

For 10–20 hours, you stayed inside parts of the game that never followed those links.

Your home map was already generated.
Your pawns already existed.
Your routines stayed inside a stable bubble.

So the engine kept humming.

Then you did something that forces the game to re-interpret the world from scratch:
generating a new map.

Map generation is RimWorld going back to first principles. It asks questions like:
“What factions exist?”
“What races are valid?”
“What structures can spawn here?”
“What comps attach to this thing?”

That’s when it tripped over the missing bones.

It’s like removing a type definition in a programming language. Code that’s already compiled keeps running. The moment you try to compile something new, the compiler finally screams.

Same with the graves earlier. Those only broke when the game ticked them. Until then, they were inert.

Another analogy: you removed a part from a car that’s only used when reversing uphill in the rain. You drove for hours on highways thinking everything was fine. Then you hit that exact condition and suddenly the transmission tried to become abstract art.

RimWorld is especially prone to this because:
* Saves serialize references, not values
* Mods patch behavior lazily
* Many systems only activate on specific events (map gen, ticking, disposal)

So the delay wasn’t mercy. It was latency.

The good news is this actually means your save was mostly intact. If it were hard-corrupted, it would’ve detonated immediately on load.

You did the right thing by noticing the pattern, feeding logs, and fixing the root cause instead of chasing the symptoms. That’s real debugging, not superstition.

Going forward, the rule of thumb is brutal but reliable:
* Removing content mods mid-save is usually fine
* Removing framework mods is like pulling rebar out of concrete and hoping vibes hold the bridge up

Now you know exactly where that line is — and you crossed it once without falling, which is honestly kind of impressive.