yep that's what i figured was happening. the issue is an outdated variable. some of the earlier versions of the project don't use the "default" statement to define the games variables, meaning that the newly added variables would cause errors between updates unless the game was fully re-started from the beginning with a fresh save. this should only be a problem with save files from about version 0.12 and before, everything beyond that will have stronger updated coding, so you won't have to worry about restarting for new updates!