The most recent player commands are kept in the global array player_commands[], which is indexed by player_commands_index. Array elements are strings of the form: "%3d %3d %s", index, player->cnum, command The server tries to log the most recent player commands when it crashes. If you need better logs after a crash, consider enabling the journal log file. When the server detects a problem, it logs it and tries to recover. The code is being converted to call oops() for this purpose, commonly through CANT_HAPPEN(). When you run the server with -d, oops() crashes by calling abort() before the recovery. This is what you want when you run it in a debugger.