When something breaks
Reading the Console, finding logs, what the crash prompt actually does, and filing a bug report that gets acted on.
The Console
The Console panel, tabbed next to the Data Viewer, scrolls a live feed of activity. Each line carries a severity colour and a time measured from launch. It mirrors the whole log stream at Info and above, from every part of the app rather than the cook alone, so the file loader, the audio thread, plugins and background work all report here. Warn and Error lines carry a tinted background across the full row so they stand out in a long feed.
Info is normal chatter, safe to ignore
Warn means something looked off and the operation continued: a missing input, a value clamped to a safe range, a skipped feature
Error means an operation failed, and is usually the line that explains a red node or an empty viewport
A console line states the reason but does not name the node it came from. The node is in fact known: a cook error is captured with the id of the node that raised it, and the panel simply drops it on the way in, along with the line's category. Read the reason here and find the node by its red border in the graph. Clear empties the feed before you reproduce a problem.
Filter the Console with the Warn and Error buttons. A wall of Info lines hides the one error you are hunting.
Logs
The Console covers the current session. A fuller record is written to disk, which is what you need when reporting something that has already happened or that crashed the app before you could read it. See Logs & diagnostics for the exact file locations.
Logs are plain text and stay on your machine. Nothing is uploaded unless you choose to send it.
After a crash
A session that ended without a clean shutdown is detected at the next launch, and the Console names the crash-report file.
Opening the project also raises a prompt reading Unsaved changes detected. Restore?, with Yes, restore and No, discard. The prompt names the backup file it found.
Autosave does run. Every two minutes, a project with a file path and unsaved edits is written to <project>.dna.autosave.1 beside itself, rotating the previous ones down to .autosave.2 and .autosave.3. The tab shows a dot while there are unsaved edits. A project you have never saved has no path to write beside, so it gets no backup at all.
Neither button in the prompt recovers anything, so the backup file is what you act on. Yes, restore only clears the prompt and marks the session clean; it does not open the backup. No, discard does the same and deletes the command log, which cannot be undone. Note the path the prompt shows, dismiss it, and open that .autosave.1 file yourself.
Save by hand, often. Cmd+S prompts for a location on every save. See Autosave & recovery.
Reporting a bug
Note what you did immediately before it happened: the exact node, the value you changed, the file you imported.
Copy the relevant Console error lines.
Choose Help > Report Bug… to assemble the log and crash report (see Logs & diagnostics).
Save a small
.dnafile that reproduces the problem on its own, if you can.
A two-node project that breaks every time is worth more than a paragraph describing a hundred-node graph.
Skim Gotchas first. A bypassed node, a paused clock, or a viewport in the wrong mode reads as broken and is a setting behaving as designed.