When something breaks
Most problems leave a trail. Here's how to read the Console, find your logs, recover a crashed session, and file a useful bug report.
Things go sideways sometimes — a node turns red, the viewport goes blank, or the app quits when you didn't ask it to. Almost none of this loses your work, and most of it tells you exactly what happened if you know where to look. Start here.
Read the Console
The Console is a panel (usually tabbed next to the Performance panel) that scrolls a live feed of what DNA is doing. Each line has a timestamp and a severity colour:
Info — normal chatter. Ignore unless you're curious.
Warning — something looked off but DNA carried on (a missing input, a value clamped to a safe range, a feature it skipped). Worth a glance.
Error — an operation actually failed. This is usually the line that explains a red node or an empty viewport.
When a node goes red, open the Console and scroll to the most recent error — it names the node and the reason in plain language far more often than the node badge does. Clear the feed before you reproduce a problem so the only lines left are the ones that matter.
If you only want to see the bad news, filter the Console to Warnings and Errors. A wall of Info lines hides the one error you're hunting for.
Find your logs
The Console shows this session. A more complete record lives on disk, which is what you'll want when reporting something that already happened or that crashed the app before you could read it. See Logs & diagnostics for the exact file locations and how to attach them to a report.
Logs are plain text and stay on your machine. Nothing is uploaded unless you choose to send it.
Recover a crashed session
DNA saves a rolling backup of your project in the background while you work, separate from your manual saves. If the app closes unexpectedly — a crash, a power cut, a force-quit — the next time you open DNA it notices the previous session didn't shut down cleanly and offers to bring your work back.
You'll see an Unsaved changes detected. Restore? prompt with two choices:
Yes, restore — replays the background backup plus everything you did since your last manual save, so you pick up where you left off.
No, discard — ignores the backup and opens the project as it was at your last manual save.
If you're unsure, choose Restore — you can always undo afterwards, but you can't get discarded edits back.
You control how often the background backup runs and how many copies it keeps in Preferences. A shorter interval means less lost on a crash. See Autosave & recovery for the full picture.
Report a bug
If something is genuinely broken, a good report gets it fixed faster:
Note what you did right before it happened — the exact node, the value you changed, the file you imported.
Copy the relevant Console error lines.
Grab your log file (see Logs & diagnostics).
If you can, save a small .dna file that reproduces the problem on its own.
A two-node project that breaks every time is worth more than a paragraph describing a hundred-node graph.
Before you blame a bug, skim Gotchas — a lot of "broken" turns out to be a setting behaving exactly as designed (a bypassed node, a paused clock, a viewport in the wrong mode).