I was playing on my phone, and the wi-fi went out. I didn't want to waste data, so I got on my computer. It didn't save anything I did for like the last 5-10 minutes I was on. If I get back on my phone, is that going to screw things up because now the PC and phone are not synced or something?

if you properly sync (CTRL + ALT + G) on your pc, then your phone should* load your latest progress from the server when you go back to your phone

make sure to properly close the app before opening it again, so it doesnt override the progress with data from the phone

* this is all a big shoud, cause with syncing you never quite know, but in general you should be fine

Tough question! Best answer I can give is: probably.

As far as I know it is pretty difficult to actually mess up your game state to a point where you can't continue playing the level at all. The worst that usually can happen is you losing some progress. But syncing in idle is a difficult problem that no-one really understands fully.

If your phone loses data connection (and therefore can't sync anymore), the last state synced to the game servers will be fetched from whatever device you continue playing from. My suggestion if this happens, just bite the bullet, enable mobile data JUST for a manual sync and then exit the game on your phone. Then, you can freely continue playing from any other device.

When your phone couldn't sync and you continue on any other device, your server state is probably overwritten by the browser state. So, if you again want to continue playing on mobile, the app will sync and load the browser session/state, hence, delete all the actions that it couldn't sync before. If you hadn't played on browser in the meantime, the mobile app might sync what it couldn't sync before. But I had cases before where I lost progress from mobile to mobile. So, it could be that there isn't any other way than to enable mobile data if you don't want to lose progress.

So, either way, before switching devices I'd personally suggest to always sync manually. If for whatever reason that isn't possible, the next time some device syncs your progress will be lost. If you come back to the device that couldn't sync before, I would make sure that it has data when you open the app the next time. That way, the current server state would be loaded and you wouldn't lose more game progress by another unintentional sync from the wrong device (the mobile app won't overwrite the synced browser state with the yet un-synced mobile actions).

I hope I could put all my thoughts and experiences in understandable sentences. If it sounds complex, then that is because syncing is a complex topic, in idle at least.

This is possibly the single most exploitable flaw left in the game.

And this would be why you have to be connected to receive the artifacts once the dig is completed.