I've been making another full playthrough to see what these new patches have changed. I just leave the game running while I do other things, and then play in the short windows while I'm waiting for stuff... it's a background time sink.

A couple of times now, I've left the game running for an extended period and either come back to the crash reporting tool, or it crashed shortly after. No worries on that - memory leaks happen. However, when I bring the game back up, it has fully reset. It asks me for my nudity preferences again, the tutorials are all turned back on, I assume game settings are also reset to default though I don't usually change them much.

Most interesting, though, is that my DLC content is reset. After the first crash, a second Traveler's Chest showed up at my camp (there are now 2 chest tabs in my camp storage window). The new traveler's chest has a whole new round of DLC (that face-changing helmet, the close, the dagger, etc), the adventuring pack (just some food and maybe healing potions, I guess)... all the stuff that gets added when you turn on the DLC got re-added.

Has anyone else experienced this? Do we know what's happening to cause the game to reset like that? Is there some file that gets nuked and recreated, and in doing so causes the game to re-deploy the DLC?

It's not really a problem. If anything, it's just extra fun stuff (though having to re-do my startup game settings and turn off tutorials is a bit annoying), but I'm curious if anyone else has experienced this, and what other side effects it has.

yes it normal to have more than one chest and imo your system will be behind the crash... trying to update or turn things off

Not sure what you mean by 'trying to update or turn things off'. While I do update things frequently, I don't have any software that automatically updates without user intervention, and I'm neither updating nor mucking around in the game directory while the game is running. I've noticed the game slows if I leave it running for too long, and simply restarting the game resolves that. That's classic memory leak behavior. My system is a few years old and isn't stellar (only 32Gb RAM, and only an RTX 3070Ti), but it is more than capable of running the game.

And that's all fine. Memory leaks happen, and I leave this thing running in the background all day so I can play a few turns while I'm waiting for things to load or automated tasks to finish on my other machine. I'm sure nobody intended it to sit unused, jumping repeatedly in and out of focus, for tens of hours at a time. I'm not sad about the crash.

I'm just surprised that the game duplicated my DLC content after the crash... and more, I'm surprised at the way that it did so.