Rollback

A rollback is an operation which restores a database to a prior state. In Growtopia, this affects worlds, player inventories, gem counts, and stats usually in order to revert the effects of a game-breaking bug. Consequentially, any work which players put in during the timeframe which was rolled back is lost.

In compensation for lost work and time, rollbacks are often accompanied with an Apology Weekend, a weekend-long event in which in-app purchase values are increased and players have a chance of getting lucky drops from breaking blocks. Any gem purchases made within the timeframe which gets rolled back are given back to the player at double the value.

First rollback

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The Rollback Plaque and its tree

The first rollbacks occurred on February 23rd of 2013, and resulted in 24 hours of data to be reverted twice. The second rollback occurred only a few hours after the first, and sent players back to the same place they were rolled back to the first time.

The occurrence happened due to an oversight where store-bought items—which had a rarity of 999 at the time—to recycle at a significantly higher rate than the purchase price. Players caught onto this and took advantage of it to effectively gain an unlimited amount of gems. This completely ruined the game's economy at the time. A rollback was issued to restore the game to a state before the exploit was first discovered, and the exploit itself was fixed by adjusting the store items to not recycle for any gems, though they were changed much later to recycle at 10% of the original price. The shop items were also set to not display a rarity.

The Apology Weekend which followed this ordeal granted players to splice the Rollback Plaque in the duration of the event. It was made by splicing a Cave Background Seed with a Door Seed. After the weekend, the recipe would make the new Happy Joy Plaque instead.

Second rollback

A second rollback occurred on October 5th of 2013. Only a few hours of data was lost this time.

The issue which ruined the game this time was with special "Null_seed". How to obtain that? It could get by using Harvest moon blast. When you use that, there could plant a null tree. If you harvest, it drops seed called ==Null ****(number)==, and recycle for random and abnormal amounts of gems, ranging from millions down to negative millions of gems. The glitchy seeds existed long before they were discovered.[1]

The Rollback Plaque II was available during the second Apology Weekend, and was made by splicing a Cave Background Seed with a Sign Seed together. Unlike the previous plaque, this recipe was not reused for another item afterwards.