oh man, idk wtf happened but somehow an entire quest got erased from my game besides one remnant of it, the bad ending basically. you can still trigger it, but the guy's tent is completely gone and the whole sequence where you can save him is completely gone.
i know i made the quest and everything surrounding it, but even the guy's tent on the overworld is gone. that wouldn't make sense at all. the overworld was made long before any of the quests were and then i just populated it, so all of the tents and stuff were pre-existing. why tf would i delete the tent from the overworld? seriously what the hell happened?
i'm going to have to dig up some old backups to see if i maybe just erased it on accident somehow but idk, removing that overworld tent feels deliberate. idk why i would have done that to begin with though. just really strange.
all of the correct variables are in the game's database, but even the letter that you can read from him is completely gone. not even in the plugin file. i don't UNDERSTAND.
okay none of my previous builds have the rest of this quest, and it looks like i got rid of the tent on the build where all of the NPCs had been placed in, which is the one right after the build with every quest in the game.
what i'm guessing happened is that i made the ending of the quest first somehow and then just didn't make the rest but thought i did? then later on when i saw that there wasn't anything linking the overworld tent to another map i just deleted it from the overworld. still doesn't make a whole lot of sense though because i have all of those variables that are just chilling, doing nothing. and i totally missed his note when i was putting in all of the notes/books/journals/etc into the game.
i could have sworn that i made it, though. i could HAVE SWORN. maybe i just didn't save my work that day or some weird shit like that. maybe my laptop ran out of battery and i just forgot that i never finished the quest. still super duper weird though.
Maybe the man in your game didn't want there to be a good ending.
it's like a ghost came through and deleted everything but this guy's death scene and it's really freaky.