ChromieCraft ran out of item IDs, and the 14 October outage emptied bags

ChromieCraft, the progressive AzerothCore server, crashed a couple of times on 14 October 2026 and then stayed offline for about six hours. Between the crashes, players who logged back in found their equipment gone. On 15 October the team published a post-mortem explaining what happened.

What went wrong

Every item in the game has its own ID, and the database can hold IDs up to 4,294,967,295. AzerothCore never reuses the ID of an item that is sold, used up or destroyed, so after almost six years ChromieCraft's highest ID had reached exactly that number, although only about 20 million items still exist. At the limit the server started shutting itself down to avoid worse damage, which looked like crashes to players.

A routine that runs on startup then made it worse. It looks up the highest item ID and deletes item links above it, so the server never writes over existing data. With the highest ID at the maximum, the next ID overflowed to 0, and the routine wiped the links between items and their owners in bags, mail, the auction house and guild banks.

The team couldn't reach its primary backup at the time, and the secondary backup hadn't run properly for about two days, so some data was rolled back.

What players should know

• If you last logged in before 12 October, your character is unchanged
• If you logged in after that, items may be missing from your bags, bank, mailbox or equipment. The team has been mailing restored items, and since only 50 mails show at once, the next batch takes a minute or two to arrive
• Anything still missing goes in a ticket on the ChromieCraft Discord, with as much detail as you can give
• Joyous Journeys is back for a week, with 50% more experience until 21 October at 23:59 UTC, to make up for the hours the server was down

The team says it is checking all its backups so they run properly every time. ChromieCraft exists to find and fix problems in AzerothCore, and a problem like this only shows up on a server that has been running for years. Now that it has been found, the team says, other AzerothCore servers won't run into it.

Source: ChromieCraft's "October 14th Post-Mortem" (15 October 2026).