Dug Out — privacy & data

Anonymous play statistics (daily report)

The lifetime stats the profile card keeps - nights worked, nights that paid off and nights that ended with the heat blown, metres of tunnel dug and the deepest single night, spoil dug and spoil taken off site, targets taken, money paid out, tools bought, supports placed and quiet nights - plus how many times the game has been opened, how many minutes it has been open, and minutes on each of five screens: the main menu, planning, the shop, the night and the morning.

When: At most once a day (by the UTC date): one try a session, about a minute after the game starts, skipped if today’s report has already gone, or while a balance mod is loaded. A report that does not arrive is tried again at the next start.

Sent to: https://lostphantom.live/api/dug-out/telemetry

Every name in it, read out of the game’s code: anon version platform sessions playtimeMin scene_time metrics main_menu planning shop night morning nights scored busted metres best_night spoil removed targets banked tools supports quiet_nights

Platform: the platform as Unity names it, one word: WindowsPlayer, OSXPlayer, LinuxPlayer or Android (a Steam Deck is not told apart - it reports Linux, or Windows under Proton).

Identifier: A random install id: twelve characters the game makes up on this machine the first time it prepares a report (about a minute into a session, and only with the switch on) and then keeps. It is not made from your Steam account, your hardware or a hash of anything, it is not copied to Steam Cloud or to an account, and turning the switch off does not delete it. It lets us tell one install’s reports from another’s; nothing in them says whose install it is.

Turning it off: the SHARE ANONYMOUS STATS switch, on the SETTINGS page (MORE → SETTINGS). It is ON by default. Off stops the report before it is built. The game goes on counting sessions and minutes on your machine while it is off, and a report sent after you turn it back on includes them. Nothing in the game resets the switch. Turning ONLINE FEATURES off stops it too - though the random id is still made on this machine, because the report is prepared before that switch is asked.

What we keep: One record per install - the id, the version, the platform, the session and minute totals, the latest counters and screen minutes, and the first and last day it was heard from - plus daily totals per game. An install not heard from for 400 days is deleted; a daily total is kept for two years. A report carrying a field named like a name, an account or an email address, or any value shaped like an email address, is refused with an error rather than stored. Your IP address reaches our server with the request, as it does for any connection; it is held in memory for a few minutes to limit how often a report is accepted, and it is never written to a table or a log.

Where this is read from: Dug-Out: Dug Out/Assets/Scripts/Heist/HeistTelemetry.cs BuildPayload (the body, SceneBuckets and MetricStats); HeistTelemetryRunner.cs MaybeSend (the send); the `settings.stats` row in HeistSettingsRows.cs (the switch); StudioLink.cs (ONLINE FEATURES)

Bug reports and suggestions

Only what you write, and only when you press SEND. With it go six things the game already knows: the version and whether this is a public or a tester build, the platform (the word Unity uses — "WindowsPlayer", not your machine), the language you are reading, which screen you were on and where your run had got to, and about forty lines of the game’s own log. Stack traces are left out of that log and both of the folders the game owns are folded out of it before it is stored, because on Windows the save folder is inside a directory named after whoever is signed in to the machine. If you are running mods, their names go in as well and the box tells you so before you send. No name, no account, no email, no device name, no location, and no install id — the intake accepts one and this game does not send it, because the id it would use is the same one the statistics above carry and a bug report has no business joining you to those.

Turning it off: the ONLINE FEATURES switch on the settings page.

Where this is read from: Dug-Out: Dug Out/Assets/Scripts/Heist/HeistFeedback.cs (Fields() is the one list, walked by both the payload and the block the box shows you before you send) and HeistLogTail.cs (the log tail), held by tools/feedback-check.py and by CheckFeedback in tools/compilecheck/HeistCheck

• Your name, username, email address or any account of any kind - no game sends one. The studio’s statistics address (/api/<game>/telemetry) REFUSES a report carrying a field named like one of those, or any value shaped like an email address, with an error saying so. Slime Wars’ daily report goes to an older address that stores it as sent without that check, and it carries no such field.
• Your IP address is never stored. It reaches our server with every request, as it does for any connection, and the server holds it in memory for a few minutes to limit how often reports are accepted, then forgets it. No table has a column for it and it is not logged. (What our hosting provider’s own network logs keep is outside our code.)
• Anything you type. No chat, no search, and no bug-report text travels with the statistics.
• Your location, contacts, files, other running programs, or anything at all from outside the game.
• No advertising and no third-party analytics service runs in any of these games, and nothing is sold, rented or shared with anybody. Outside this studio’s own statistics, and not governed by its switch: every game is built with Unity, whose engine can report basic hardware details and crashes to Unity; Winter Is Here and Slime Wars tell Steam which achievements you unlock, and Slime Wars also reports lifetime playtime, kills, wins and losses to its Steam stats and leaderboards and signs in to Unity’s player-account service with your Steam login for its online features. Slime Wars and Slime Dominion include Unity’s ad library for a possible phone version and never start it, and Winter Is Here carries PlayFab and Photon code from an older project that nothing calls.

What this adds up to on our side is mostly charts. Per game and per day the dashboard shows:

• how many installs were heard from that day, and how many were new
• total sessions and total minutes played
• which screens took the most time, added up across everybody
• which versions are still in the wild
• whether an install came back a day or a week later

For the games that send a daily report (Winter Is Here, Dug Out, Smokestack Valley, Pencil and Paper and Slime Wars) we also keep one record per install - its latest totals and the first and last day it was heard from - and the dashboard lists a few of them under a short label that stays the same between visits. So we can tell one install from another, but not who is behind it: there is no name, account, Steam id, email or IP address anywhere in it, and the id is random. The screen-time batches keep no per-install record at all.

• The bug-report and suggestion boxes send only what you typed and the six things listed above, only when you press SEND, and they show you those six before you do.