Twine: <<back>> macro doesn't work [solved! mostly]

I’m trying out Twine for the first time, and it seems I’ve run into a snag. Whenever I use the <> macro (in Sugarcane), the story prints out the following error message:
can’t find passage “undefined” in history

Is this some kind of bug? I’m using Twine version 1.3.5 for Windows.

(Another odd bug, possibly related: Also, there is a passage that sends me back to the beginning when I hit back, even though there’s another passage between it. It seems it’s not treating itself as a separate passage for some reason?)

ETA: It looks like the person in this thread has my exact same problem. Shame nobody seems to have solved it, though.

…And, after searching the Twine google groups, I found a solution! That second thing still keeps happening, though. And there’s various other bugginess as well, too. I’ll keep at it, but I’ll still be using Inform all the same.

I just finished my first Twine game this week, and helped my daughter write an EctoComp entry today. And yeah, Twine is buggy. <> doesn’t work. <> doesn’t work. Click any “share” link opens in the same window instead of a separate window (which I had to fix by directly editing the HTML). Any global search says the text doesn’t appear in the story, even though it does. Trying to “save as” (to copy a story) results in a crash. I don’t even remember everything.

Yeah, it’s nice to hear that other people are dealing with bugs as well. I was starting to think that maybe I was jinxed!

While we’re on the subject of the back macro - does the back macro have to say “back”?

For custom text, I’ve been using regular links instead, but for some reason my regular link back to Start isn’t working. I’m thinking of swapping in a back macro there, but I don’t want it to say “back”. :frowning:

I never found a way to customize the text of built-in features, but you could always edit the HTML afterwards, find the text, and just change it manually. Downside is that you have to do that every time you recompile, or at least in the final version before you release it.

You can customize the back link text in Twine with a macro:

eturnerx.com/fot/The%20Future%20 … ne.html#14
(Scroll a little down to back label and back labeldefault)

I did find that it had a problem with the first time you use back when using back labeldefault “text”, since it didn’t seem to initialize the text until the second time the player sees the back macro.

Re: using links to return to the Start passage - Twine actually doesn’t let you ever return to the Start passage. To get around it, I always create a “Start2” passage and put in it <<display “Start”>> and reference that instead.

Ah-hah, thank you!