To start with the basics, you're probably not wanting to use the Symbol fill at all. It is a very ancient way of filling with symbols, and only gives a very regular pattern. You're probably want to use Draw -> Symbols in Area instead.

Not sure about the crashing, but I am able to reproduce it, so I'll bring it to the attention of the developer. But this fill type is likely to go away in the future, so a fix is likely to be lower priority.

Check out select nearby symbols and delete nearby symbols.

This livestream I plan to teach you all a bit more about combining styles. I have shown elements of this before in many of my live mapping sessions, but this time I am going to make it a focus of the stream, and give a more complete and coherent overview of the process.

We will talk about thinks like setting up your own template that combines the resources from two styles so you can have everything at the ready when you make a new map.

As usually, you can visit https://youtube.com/live/reoS0Mzlnzk at the appointed time (which you should see in your time zone in the left forum sidebar) to watch the video, or use the player below.

I need to open this in a debugger and walk the drawing list to confirm this, but this is what I suspect happens:

Symbol definitions are kind of a separate drawing, and when you edit a symbol, the editor locks you down to the insides of that symbol definition, with no access to outside resources.

So, when you place your self-exploding symbol into the editor window, there doesn't exist a definition for it there. And even if a symbol is set to explode on placement, it is still placed as a symbol, causing the symbol definition to be copied into the definition of your symbol. The symbol itself is exploded, but the definition is still there.

Now, when you exit the symbol editor and go back to the drawing, suddenly everything is available again, leaving you with 2 definitions of the same symbol, one in the main drawing, and one inside the definition of your table.

So, how to deal with this. Many ways really, choose one of them:

• Just delete the duplicate symbol from the catalog. Yes, this removes both, but you can then reinsert the non-exploding original if you want it there
• Before closing the symbol editor window, bring up the symbol manager, as that will just display the definitions inside that definition, and delete it from there. The symbol manager should ideally be blank when opened from within a symbol editor window.
• Don't edit symbols this way. Define everything in your main drawing instead, remember to explode everything, and then use Symbols -> define symbol to define a symbol from the selected entities in your drawing

Saved effects settings are found in @System\Effects. They are regular .fcw files

Drawing tools are found in @System\Drawtools. Each style has it's own folder here, and each draw tool is a .dto file, and if it is a macro tool it will also have a .dtm file and optionally a .fcw (for preview) file.

Effects are stored in the map, so existing maps will have all their effects on a new install.