How to keep changes in a blender animation and menus ?

Hi all,

So I’ve started Blender pretty recently and I’ve yet to learn a considerable amount of infos regarding the program itself and what it’s capable of.

Right now what I’d like to know is how Blender loads a baked and rendered animation.
For example, I did a basic fire sim (cube for smoke, cube for domain, smoke flow force field and some lights) which came out pretty fine but yesterday I loaded the .blend file, changed the smoke flow direction, baked all dynamics and rendered my thing all over again but only the smoke emitting cube was rendered (without the smoke that is, just as if I was looking at it in 3D view).

Am I missing something ?

Also, why is it that everytime I change something in a menu, say a domain menu, go to another one and jumping back to it my changes aren’t there yet ?

I reckon those are basic questions, probably asked a million times and I tried to search the forum (like: opening a blender file issues, loading a .blend file, changes won’t save etc…) but didn’t find my happiness : / .

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to help !

Cheers