X3TC: OFF Military Outpost hostile and can't be hacked

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soulmata
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X3TC: OFF Military Outpost hostile and can't be hacked

Post by soulmata » Fri, 25. Nov 16, 09:41

Anyone encounter this before?

At the 2nd to last OFF mission, I hit the military outpost with stray fire and it went hostile. Now I can't finish OFF, because the next step is to dock at that station. There are no hack missions for it; all generated hack missions in the nearby sectors (including the adjacent sector) only offer nearby pirate bases.

There seems to be no possible way to get the station to be neutral again. Any ideas?

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Post by Timsup2nothin » Fri, 25. Nov 16, 11:36

I suspect reloading might be your only option...but...

You could try comming the station and looking for someone to apologize to. You also might try apologizing to the local head of security ship, though I think that has even less chance.
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Post by Alan Phipps » Fri, 25. Nov 16, 11:42

At least you are not alone. I cannot find any guaranteed vanilla solutions in searching past threads apart from a reload to before the stray fire, sorry.
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Post by AL'42 » Fri, 25. Nov 16, 13:17

I find this one of the most annoying features of the game and should have been fixed in an update long ago, tiny amount of stray fire and the station goes hostile (or hit a gate and the pirate station goes hostile, or minor docking scrape same thing).

Just last night saved the Duke’s home sector from a massive Paranid invasion force as they came through the gate, did I get any thanks… No, the whole sector is now hostile to me because of few stray shots hit the gate which is plain bonkers (and illogical).

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Post by Alan Phipps » Fri, 25. Nov 16, 15:21

Still, you can at least hack the Duke's HQ to blue again, which is not the case it seems with the Plot Military Outpost.
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Post by soulmata » Sat, 26. Nov 16, 01:28

I ended up using the "Advanced Apology Hotkey" script to force a blue again.

I agree, it's a pretty damn dumb bug, but I was already modified so it wasn't a big leap to add the apology hotkey.

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Post by Snafu_X3 » Sat, 26. Nov 16, 01:56

There are 2 miniplot missions requiring access to M148:
  • First is a Terran-based mission that allows you to dock at 1 station. After you complete that (& escape) the station turns red
    The second is the OFF miniplot chain, which turns all stations to blue
It won't help you now, but it /is/ important (for an easy life) to do these in the correct order: if you don't you'll be left with 1 red (unhackable? - I think so) station in a sea of blue.. plus its red ships!

Sorry, but I suspect that even your friendly pirate station in the adjacent UK sector won't be able to hack an Outpost :( However, as the plot is unpassable you may like to try saving first, then destroying that station & waiting for it to respawn (possibly using the missile trick) to see if that resets its status.. ofc you may have some major rep to regain if successful :(
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Post by Sinxar » Sat, 26. Nov 16, 03:24

Snafu_X3 wrote:destroying that station & waiting for it to respawn
I don't think that would be possible as it is a plot critical station (indestructable at 93% hull).

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Post by soulmata » Sat, 26. Nov 16, 08:07

Snafu_X3 wrote:There are 2 miniplot missions requiring access to M148:
  • First is a Terran-based mission that allows you to dock at 1 station. After you complete that (& escape) the station turns red
    The second is the OFF miniplot chain, which turns all stations to blue
It won't help you now, but it /is/ important (for an easy life) to do these in the correct order: if you don't you'll be left with 1 red (unhackable? - I think so) station in a sea of blue.. plus its red ships!

Sorry, but I suspect that even your friendly pirate station in the adjacent UK sector won't be able to hack an Outpost :( However, as the plot is unpassable you may like to try saving first, then destroying that station & waiting for it to respawn (possibly using the missile trick) to see if that resets its status.. ofc you may have some major rep to regain if successful :(
I had already completed the Terran plot before I began OFF.

The station in question is invincible and cannot go below 93%.

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Post by Triaxx2 » Sat, 26. Nov 16, 22:38

Is docking required to complete the mission? If not, then try earning some Argon fame. That should force an update to it's friend/foe rankings.
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Post by Snafu_X3 » Sat, 26. Nov 16, 23:06

Triaxx2 wrote:Is docking required to complete the mission? If not, then try earning some Argon fame. That should force an update to it's friend/foe rankings.
I don't think generic <race> rep gain will work that way :(

However, another thought occurs: turn off a trader's 'show as enemy to me' setting, then trade as much expensive crap as you can with the station if possible (this will prolly require long hrs OOS); that /may/ bring the /station's/ rep back up to a lvl where you can accept generic missions and/or dock

Alternatively try comming the Split mission commander remotely? If he'll talk to you that will at least provide some guidance as to whether it's Argon or Split rep you need to gain..
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Find a hack or reload

Post by Bill Huntington » Sun, 27. Nov 16, 21:42

You can hack the station from nearby sectors and you must, unless you reload. But the MO has to be closest red station. If it's the same distance as others, you might get a choice then. I've got a hack as far as five sectors away, if the selected station is the closest one. Maybe you have to blow up some red stations; unattributively of course. Or just looking for hacks, though they aren't common.

And the problem is more serious than that. The whole station has an on-off switch where it changes from red stations to blue at a certain point. If the MO would switch with it. This MO would switch to its opposite. Okay you can get along without it or find the hack later but it's irritating.

Good luck.
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Post by Triaxx2 » Sun, 27. Nov 16, 22:34

Worth a shot at least. I might give it a go to see if it'll do the job.
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Post by soulmata » Mon, 28. Nov 16, 01:45

Triaxx2 wrote:Is docking required to complete the mission?
Yeah, the actual next step was "Dock at MO". You can't proceed to the next step without docking first, since docking is what triggers the mission to update and you to get your next orders.

The super-annoying part was that was literally the last mission step before "The Final Battle", where you jump to the (as of then still concealed) Kha'ak sector for the epic final fight. I also always play Dead is Dead and so reloading is a big no-no for me, which *generally* is OK because as of 3.1 there aren't many gamebreaking bugs - the few bugs left I can usually easily work around. This one was a showstopper though so I went to S&M and found something that fixed it: Advanced Hotkey turned it blue for me and I finished the mission.

Next time I play through the plots I think I'm gonna find a mod that disables hostility or rep loss from station friendly fire, since that mechanic in general is dumb, but that applies to just about any game where the player can inflict friendly fire and result in NPC hostility (sure, it's open to abuse, but I believe that the player should never be able to break the story, no matter their actions).

The interesting thing is that Egosoft did a much better job with this on the Goner plots. There's a step where you have to defend multiple Goner stations over multiple sectors. However, those stations AREN'T invulnerable - they can be destroyed, and you just have to keep proceeding with the mission until you can actually save some. It would have been better if OFF had let that MO be destroyed, and then the plot just gets delayed while it is rebuilt and then continued later on.


Bill: I'm fairly confident station hacks for that MO can't be generated, because once I had turned all the nearby pirate bases blue, those missions stopped being generated entirely. I was jumping through Unknown Sector / Nathan's Voyage / Black Hole Sun / Wastelands for about 2 game hours, and even though it generated probably around 50 or so light bulb missions, none of them were station hacks for quite some time. I believe that because I did have a mission generated to set a pirate base to blue in the Unknown Sector adjacent to M148, but that pirate base was all the way in Belt of Aguilar, 3 gate away, and the MO was just 1 jumpgate away.

It could also have been that I was incredibly unlucky in that regard.

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Post by RAVEN.myst » Mon, 28. Nov 16, 02:09

soulmata wrote:Bill: I'm fairly confident station hacks for that MO can't be generated
As far as I'm aware, that's correct. Just to clarify, the station in question for you is actually the Military BASE, not the Military OUTPOST, though they look the same and are functionally identical. That last being the case, I know from experience that if the MO in the same sector, the one that is turned red by the Pearle jailbreak, is not turned blue by OFF, then there is no other way to do it - it stays that way. In my latest game, this happened to me (for some reason, OFF didn't turn it blue, even though I played in correct sequence), and I really wanted to check its available marines (a few had high price tags, so may have been decent - I only use one race's ships/stations/marines per game, and this was an Argon game), so I too great pains to maximise odds of a station hack mission - I was lucky enough for a pirate base to be built in the unknown sector next to Argon M148, and I took some station building missions from there to add several more pirate-owned stations to the sector - to no avail. Game DAYS later, I could still not find station hacks there, despite many many and very frequent visits, including sector exit/re-entry sessions to stimulate generic mission generation. Nada. Zip. Bugger-all. 19+ game days into the game, I'm now waiting to deliver the last microchips to my X-Hub (all other plots etc having long since been completed) so that I can play the HQ plot, and that station is still annoyingly red (now I don't care about the marines anymore, of course, as my personnel situation is fine, but it just annoys me on principle, hehehehe)

My supposition is that the MB in M148 is the same in this regard (I haven't had this problem myself, as I am extremely careful of inflicting friendly fire, so such incidents are pretty much unheard of in my games), and what I've read on this forum and elsewhere seems to back that up - the only "hacks" that work are game hacks (mods).
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Post by Bill Huntington » Mon, 28. Nov 16, 08:34

I think you're right, Raven. There's always unlucky odds but I remember after some later revisions I wasn't getting any hacks. It was easier to be very careful and to reload if something happened.

It was weird in the early versions, to get a hack turning the Military
Base blue early in the plot, then having it flip to red when it was time to dock. There were a few games when I started over because I had no good answer.

Good luck.
Bill in S.F., enjoying the game

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Post by RAVEN.myst » Mon, 28. Nov 16, 10:06

Yes, judicious saving of the game is a skill that the X-series certainly trains in us :D It's the same for me in Rebirth - though most of the game-stoppers have been fixed by now, still occasionally a ship decides to run away from an attack while executing a trade, and then gets irrevocably stuck, leaving no recourse but to reload, for example... In TC and AP I also still do timed sequential saves - typically I have hourly ones, and if I am feeling particularly paranoid, a daily one too. And all that only for the sake of forestalling or avoiding bugs, as I hate reloading in general (I don't do it to "rewrite history", such as with boarding, for example - that feels too "cheaty" to me).
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Post by Timsup2nothin » Mon, 28. Nov 16, 10:07

RAVEN.myst wrote:
soulmata wrote:Bill: I'm fairly confident station hacks for that MO can't be generated
As far as I'm aware, that's correct. Just to clarify, the station in question for you is actually the Military BASE, not the Military OUTPOST, though they look the same and are functionally identical. That last being the case, I know from experience that if the MO in the same sector, the one that is turned red by the Pearle jailbreak, is not turned blue by OFF, then there is no other way to do it - it stays that way. In my latest game, this happened to me (for some reason, OFF didn't turn it blue, even though I played in correct sequence), and I really wanted to check its available marines (a few had high price tags, so may have been decent - I only use one race's ships/stations/marines per game, and this was an Argon game), so I too great pains to maximise odds of a station hack mission - I was lucky enough for a pirate base to be built in the unknown sector next to Argon M148, and I took some station building missions from there to add several more pirate-owned stations to the sector - to no avail. Game DAYS later, I could still not find station hacks there, despite many many and very frequent visits, including sector exit/re-entry sessions to stimulate generic mission generation. Nada. Zip. Bugger-all. 19+ game days into the game, I'm now waiting to deliver the last microchips to my X-Hub (all other plots etc having long since been completed) so that I can play the HQ plot, and that station is still annoyingly red (now I don't care about the marines anymore, of course, as my personnel situation is fine, but it just annoys me on principle, hehehehe)

My supposition is that the MB in M148 is the same in this regard (I haven't had this problem myself, as I am extremely careful of inflicting friendly fire, so such incidents are pretty much unheard of in my games), and what I've read on this forum and elsewhere seems to back that up - the only "hacks" that work are game hacks (mods).
Wait...isn't the OUTPOST used only in the Terran plot? So OFF turns it blue, but just because it is in the sector, not because you actually need it, right?

If this is correct I'm thinking that after the Terran plot gets done with it the invulnerability would be turned off. That makes the "blow it up and see if it respawns blue" a possibility. Doesn't get you access to the marines, since they get blown up, but maybe solves the annoyance.
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Re: X3TC: OFF Military Outpost hostile and can't be hacked

Post by PJG1973 » Fri, 7. May 21, 13:01

Sorry to bump this but after trying for days to apologise, hack and destroy the military base - it'll never change to blue (and I'll never finish OFF?) Any chance egosoft will patch this? Because it was days of toil before looking this up I have no saves left where it wasnt red.

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Re: X3TC: OFF Military Outpost hostile and can't be hacked

Post by Alan Phipps » Fri, 7. May 21, 15:07

@ PJG1973. No, Egosoft are unlikely to be working any more on X3TC plots. Your best bet if you have tried everything suggested in vanilla will probably be to go down the modding route by asking in the S&M forum how to find and change the station hostility attribute in your save. Not everybody has had this issue and so it must be an unforeseen sequence of events or coincidences that leads up to it.
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