"-autocreate" parameter did not create world files, world lost

[Te3-BloodyIron LAN36 IN TWO WEEK]

I upgraded my Terraria server from 1353 to 1403 recently, and in the process wanted to create a new world, a large one (previously we were playing on small). So I added to the launch flags "-autocreate 3".

The world generated, game played, all was fine. Until I went to try to update it to 1404 today, and noticed something unacceptable.

I also want to add that I have a cron job that runs ever 15 minutes, instructing the Terraria server to save. This is something I setup long ago. I adjusted it to work with the 1403 server, and it worked just fine.

I log into my server this morning, since I _HAVE_ to update to 1404 as 1404 clients cannot play on 1403 servers (WHY?). And I instruct the server to save and quit gracefully. I then notice it's taking forever in the step where it's trying to make a backup. It never completes.

At this point I had done some parallel tasks of copying the world to the new server file location, but after being concerned about the backup time, I went to check the folder for the world. THE WORLD FOLDER WAS COMPLETELY EMPTY. No wld file, no backup file, NOTHING.

Panicking, I figured my nightly backups of my VMs might have caught this. I restore the VM from backups, and guess what. THE WORLD IS COMPLETELY GONE AND WAS NEVER WRITTEN TO DISK.

This kind of topology is UNACCEPTABLE. I told the server to generate a world, and save, and it didn't create the world files on-disk, or even throw errors. The file system permissions are correct, so the process had sufficient access to create and modify the world files. BUT IT JUST DIDN'T MAKE THEM.

All that work, down the drain, because of some bad programming oversight. Did you guys even test this? >:(

Now I have to create a new world and tell my SO and friends that all that work is just GONE, and there's nothing I can do about it.

[Te3-BloodyIron LAN36 IN TWO WEEK]

Okay, so I think I have found something worth mentioning. The autocreate parameter seems to IGNORE the declared world file location, and just put it in the "~/.local/share/Terraria/Worlds" folder, instead of the explicitly declared folder I refer to in the init script. So my previous world appears to be in that folder.

This is REALLY bad programming design guys. COME ON.

Now to see if the world is just fine...

[Te3-BloodyIron LAN36 IN TWO WEEK]

okay yeah, my world was there, just copied it to the place I was explicitly listing. Crisis averted but this is most definitely not working as expected.