[1.32] BUG Mining Ships Won't Return To Station - Fixed in 1.50

[Tristavius]

CATEGORY

Effectively totally prevents player progression.

GAME

Started in 1.32.
Explorer origin.
No mods in use.

DESCRIPTION OF BUG

All mining ships assigned to automine for a station will proceed to the resources correctly. Once full they will just wait around forever and never return to the station.

TESTS TRIED/NOTES

Ships tried in various numbers (original group was 12, but tried in batches including a lone ship.
Station is in Noplieo's Fortune II.
Mining has been tried in Nopileo's Fortune IV and all Grand Exchange systems with same result.
Ships have qualified pilot and crew.
Station has manager.
Station has enormous amounts of all storage types available.
Station has adequate docking (especially when only one miner tried)
Station has been in various stages of construction and also 'complete'
Station has been given below-suggested, suggested and way-above-suggested station budgets
Recall function on station does not recall ships
Player presence (or lack of) in station or mining system does not effect this bug
Removing ships from assignment to the station and re-adding does not fix
Different models of S/M ship tried with same results. Large ships not available in this game yet so untested.

FIXES

No permanent fix so gameplay is effectively halted. Ships must be cleared of their station assignment and manually emptied before being reassigned at which point they will head off to mine and repeat the bug.

[Mirador]

I have this same problem. I am using a few mods, but none that should interfere with this, and as the OP has no mods in his game i don't think this is a mod issue.

I don't know if this is new to 1.32 or not, but i didn't notice this issue in previous versions. My station is in Trinity Sanctum 3.

There is one thing i noticed however, the miner vessels are not FULL. They have the max amount of mineral/gas that they can hold, but they are NOT filling total capacity of hold. Usually with 4 units or similar left. I have a theory that they are seeing space left in their hold so mining to fill the holds but not being able to hold any more, thus never filling the cargo hold.

[phagen87]

I have the exact same issue. Please fix it with 1.5

[Paradoxon]

Same issue here. I believe it has something to do with storage. In my PHQ I use all six minable ressources and have a miner each assigned to the station (3 gas, 3 mineral miners). Once assigned, each miner has the order to autogather all three ressources of their type, for mineral miners that would be ice, ore and silicon. Unfortunatelly, you can't set a miner to gather only one of those ressources since any attempt to delete the other two off their behaviour list will be overwritten by your station manager after some time. If you reach a high enough storage capacity of one of the ressources my miners stop returning their load.

In the example of my PHQ I use more helium and methane than hydrogen. since the autogathering behaviour of my gas miners seems to prioritize hydrogen they always start their mining runs with this ressource, as long as there is no immediate need for any of the other two. So once my hydrogen storage reaches about 50% capacity they stop returning since the station no longer requests hydrogen until it reaches critical capacity again. Helium and methane are therefor stuck at much lower capacity. If i manually unassign my miners, have them return their cargo manually and then reassign them to the station they will do a few runs to gather the ressource in critical demand until satisfied and then return to the auto-routine of gathering hydrogen that is not in demand by the station and therefor will return to float in space until the ressource in their cargo is being requested again.

These are my observations at least. Does it work the same for you?

[Tristavius]

These are my observations at least. Does it work the same for you?

It's not impossible storage is playing a factor, but in my example it seems unlikely. The station is effectively brand new and has come onine with 2x Large stores for each resource type, so there's cavernous warehouses available. The production facilities have also barely even begun so shouldn't be an issue of demand not being there. It could also well be different reasons in different people's games so every clue helps!

Some additions to my list having read other peoples notes:

* This was not present in my 1.0 game (which I abandoned due to no war after 100+ hours etc, only 2 find 1.32 is even more broke!)
* I am mining 3 types of gas but only one type of ore (claytronics raw-to-finished production chain)

[Paradoxon]

And you have the same problem with all your miners, gas and mineral?

I wanted to try this mod:
https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations ... escription

Unfortunately I didn't manage to make it work yet. For some reason my game won't start anymore when I have the mod installed.

If it works for anybody else it might confirm or refute my suspicion and further narrow down the problem

[[Sentinel]]

It is fixed with 1.5.

[proggic]

With 1.32 (vanilla): Station miner must NOT have the trade MK1 installed. Then assign it to the station - all works fine. If the Trade MK1 is installed the miners wont work for the station as intended.

[Tristavius]

With 1.32 (vanilla): Station miner must NOT have the trade MK1 installed. Then assign it to the station - all works fine. If the Trade MK1 is installed the miners wont work for the station as intended.

Thanks for the reply, but in my particular instance that's hot what's at fault. None of my miners have a trade computer. It may well help the devs though to know that fixed it for someone!

[Tristavius]

It is fixed with 1.5.

That's good to know!

Unfortunately I work at sea and we sail in about 4 hours - I'd really planned to play X4 solidly for the next 4 weeks but unless I get really, really lucky I don't think 1.5 will drop in time to save me

[[Sentinel]]

It is fixed with 1.5.

That's good to know!

Unfortunately I work at sea and we sail in about 4 hours - I'd really planned to play X4 solidly for the next 4 weeks but unless I get really, really lucky I don't think 1.5 will drop in time to save me

You could install the Beta. I don't think 1.5 final will drop before friday.

[Tristavius]

That was a good call - only 48mb and now there's a whole flood of mining ships heading for home Hopefully there's nothing too long-term game damaging in the current beta3.

[SirDeity12]

I updated the game to version 1.5 but my two mineral miners are still idling with full cargo holds. One of them is assigned to my PHQ and the other is simply set to automine the galaxy (not assigned to any particular station). I tried removing their assignments entirely and changing default assignment to dock and wait, and then setting it back to automine, thinking they may simply need a reset, but that didn't seem to make a difference. Both are still sitting there without budging an inch.

I'll try to manually fly to an AI station to sell so they can restart their automine progression from an empty cargo hold, but I doubt that'll solve anything.

Any other suggestions?

I have one gas miner on automine that seems to work flawlessly. I've never witnessed the gas miner ship have any difficulties. I read in a different thread that having a full storage in your PHQ can be a problem for autominers assigned to the PHQ, but my storage containers are not quite full. Besides, if the assigned station were full, wouldn't it make sense for the ship to automatically sell elsewhere? Might make for a good MOD, but that's an entirely separate issue...

[[Sentinel]]

Does the station need minerals or ice? I had this with gas miners. They're idling if there is no production need for gas, but as I build one and reassinged all ships, they started to harvest and atill doing it. As for single mining ships, only the automine under the default behavoir is full auto (mining+selling). The mining with context-menu is a single-use command.

[SirDeity12]

My station currently only need ice. That's what my station miner gathers. I figured out why my station miner isn't delivering his ice though. It isn't a bug. It's because I don't have a pier. I only have luxery docks and my mining ship is too large to dock there. This doesn't explain the issue I'm having with my other miner though. I believe my other miner isn't selling his Nvidium becauuse there aren't any known stations in the galaxy buying them. I wondering if Nvidium is even used as a raw material for anything. If not, then I wonder why it's so valuable? Seems the game's economy needs rebalancing.