1.5 Two trading bugs - critical!

[sh1pman]

Among others, there are two critical auto-trader bugs that made it impossible for my station to operate. First, there’s a Tethys Sentinel ship that I set to auto-buy Medical Supplies and Soja Husk for my station (4 buy range, 0 sell range). It worked perfectly for quite a while, but then it broke. It’s now stuck in a loop that it can’t get out of: first, two “execute trade” orders are created, to buy soja husk at a trading station and then sell it to my station, as they should. The ship withdraws money from my account and proceeds to dock to the trading station. After docking, it waits ~5 seconds, returns the money back to my account and unlocks, with no wares bought and both “execute trade” orders gone. After idling for a while, it generates these two orders again, and the whole loop repeats once more. As a result, nothing gets purchased and delivered to my station. (UPD: the culprit is HOP trading station, see below)

Second bug involves my other ship that is set to auto-sell various products that my station makes. The problem with this ship is that it seems to ignore Smart Chips and Scanning Arrays, and only trade Engine Parts. Price for there wares has been set to minimum, and there are huge buy orders for them at nearby Wharf and Shipyard. In fact, those stations can’t produce ships, because they’re out of these very parts. Both stations are just one gate away, well within the sell range of the auto-trader. If I remove Engine Parts from the auto-trade UI, the ship just idles and does nothing. When I add Engine Parts back, the trader starts to work again, but only with Engine Parts. Smart Chips and Scanning Arrays can still be bought from my station by other faction traders. It’s just my own ship that seems to ignore it.

These two bugs made my station unworkable, so in order to save my sanity I’m going to play something else until they’re fixed.

Both of these ships are independent auto-traders and are not assigned to the station, so that I can control what they buy and sell. It’d be nice if we could set specific wares for station-assigned auto-traders.

Oh, and another thing: My Tethys Sentinel that (used to) buy Soja Husk and Medical Supplies for the factory always went to the Trading Station, ignoring dedicated factories in the same sector, even though they had massive sell offers for much lower price than the Trading Station.

EDIT: save file and investigation below!

[magictrip]

I believe in your case the only way for the devs to identify and possible fix something is if you provide a save game with the problem you are mentioning. Other than that it would be really hard to reproduce the problem.

The first one is really weird. I would try to change ships and see if other chips are behaving the same way.

For the auto sell it's usually a matter of demand and price. You said you put the price to the minimum but you also need to check if the buy orders are with reasonable price. They preferring Engine Parts is not weird per se, it's just that the AI is probably thinking that Engine Parts have a higher profit margin. Another thing that sometimes happens is the trader be stuck with some items in their storage, that may screw things up.

At last, I would get that trader and manually trade the Smart Chips and check which profit you are getting. I also prefer to set what they sell by myself, also that is better as the money is deposited in my account instead of the Factory account, but maybe try to assign it to the Factory and see if it will start selling those items.

[sh1pman]

I believe in your case the only way for the devs to identify and possible fix something is if you provide a save game with the problem you are mentioning. Other than that it would be really hard to reproduce the problem.

The first one is really weird. I would try to change ships and see if other chips are behaving the same way.

For the auto sell it's usually a matter of demand and price. You said you put the price to the minimum but you also need to check if the buy orders are with reasonable price. They preferring Engine Parts is not weird per se, it's just that the AI is probably thinking that Engine Parts have a higher profit margin. Another thing that sometimes happens is the trader be stuck with some items in their storage, that may screw things up.

At last, I would get that trader and manually trade the Smart Chips and check which profit you are getting. I also prefer to set what they sell by myself, also that is better as the money is deposited in my account instead of the Factory account, but maybe try to assign it to the Factory and see if it will start selling those items.

Thanks for your reply, I’ll provide a save file as soon as I get home. As for the Smart Chips and Scanning Arrays, both Shipyard and Wharf have huge buy offers for max possible price, because they have (almost) none of these resources in their storage, I checked. If I set the auto-trader to only sell these two wares, he just freezes and does nothing. He also has empty cargo with no leftovers from previous trades. I can manually order him to buy and sell these wares at specific stations, it works and is hugely profitable. I can’t understand why he doesn’t want to do it on his own.

[sh1pman]

Here's the save file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/010obij8hf3ow ... ml.gz?dl=0

The ships in question are Tethys Vanguard and Hermes Vanguard.

Also, while we're at it: NPC traders from other factions tend to buy Engine Parts from my factory and then just drop them in space. The station is now surrounded by crates of Engine Parts. I don't know what to think of this.

EDIT: Ok, nailed it down a little bit. The HOP Paranid Trading Station is the culprit. I can't buy anything from it, nor can other NPC ships. It has huge sell offers, but when the ship docks to trade, something happens and the trade fails. The money then gets refunded. Both manual and auto trades fail this way. There is a large crowd of HOP ships near the station, presumably unable to trade because of this bug, and stuck in the same loop. Other stations sell their wares normally, it's just this Trading Station in Holy Vision that is bugged. It is possible to sell wares TO this station, only the buying is broken. It doesn't even let me buy anything manually: I specify how much I want to buy, click confirm, get the "transaction" sound, but nothing gets bought and the money isn't spent.

It would be nice if we got some confirmation from @Egosoft that this is being looked into, because it's a major economy-breaking glitch.

Did some more testing. The only ware I can buy from that station is Claytronics, everything else fails. In case of Claytronics, it then shows orange message "Waiting for trade to finish", and after a couple of seconds it completes normally. In case of everything else I don't even get the orange message.

[ApoxNM]

Here's the save file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/010obij8hf3ow ... ml.gz?dl=0

The ships in question are Tethys Vanguard and Hermes Vanguard.

Also, while we're at it: NPC traders from other factions tend to buy Engine Parts from my factory and then just drop them in space. The station is now surrounded by crates of Engine Parts. I don't know what to think of this.

EDIT: Ok, nailed it down a little bit. The HOP Paranid Trading Station is the culprit. I can't buy anything from it, nor can other NPC ships. It has huge sell offers, but when the ship docks to trade, something happens and the trade fails. The money then gets refunded. Both manual and auto trades fail this way. There is a large crowd of HOP ships near the station, presumably unable to trade because of this bug, and stuck in the same loop. Other stations sell their wares normally, it's just this Trading Station in Holy Vision that is bugged. It is possible to sell wares TO this station, only the buying is broken. It doesn't even let me buy anything manually: I specify how much I want to buy, click confirm, get the "transaction" sound, but nothing gets bought and the money isn't spent.

It would be nice if we got some confirmation from @Egosoft that this is being looked into, because it's a major economy-breaking glitch.

Did some more testing. The only ware I can buy from that station is Claytronics, everything else fails. In case of Claytronics, it then shows orange message "Waiting for trade to finish", and after a couple of seconds it completes normally. In case of everything else I don't even get the orange message.

Maybe it's the same bug as with black markets.

Have you tried manually buying max amount -1?
That seems to work with black markets when selling. Altough I have no idea if these bugs are related.

[sh1pman]

I tried to buy any amount, doesn't work. Just a transaction sound, no wares added, no money removed.

[sh1pman]

UPDATE: So, it appears that I fixed the first bug... somehow. I went to Engineering room of that bugged HOP Trading Station and hacked everything. Several times. Huge amount of wares got ejected into space. I then went back and tried to buy something. And it worked! The station appears to be no longer bugged. If anyone encounters that bug, just do what I did.

This bug is somehow related to the PRICE of ware being sold at the station. Remember that I discovered earlier that I could only buy Claytronics from the station? Well, its price was exactly average, while every other ware was +2% to +5% from average. After the hack, every ware went down to -3% or so from average, and I could buy them all again.

Even though I found a way to fix it, it's clearly a bug and it still needs to be addressed.