7.10 Priority wares via research or terraforming cause unexpected changes in ware buy orders

[Zanthra]

Version: 7.10
Language: English
Mods: None
Start: Untested Explorer
Save: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fzwteq ... drive_link


I am finding some weirdness with the ware buy limits and storage limits when a research or terraforming project is selected that can cause buy orders to not be available for automated miners.

In the save I have linked, the Headquarters station currently has a buy order for Ore, and miners on their way to fill that order for ore. Ice is manually limited to 100k in preparation to start the "Import Water" terraforming project, but when the terraforming project is started, the quantity of the buy order for water increases to nearly 150k (almost the entire free solid storage space on the station, and the buy order for ore and silicon go away, leaving the ore miners stuck with nowhere to deliver the ore, and unable to switch to mining the desired ice. Even stranger, if you start the teleportation Research again, even if the nividium is limited to 5000 units, a small enough value to have no real impact on the available capacity of wares, the buy orders for ore and silicon are substantially reduced anyways.

PS: Forgot that the save was just before planetary irrigation was finished, as I was still investigating what exactly was causing the bug.

For reproduction:

1. When loading the above save, look at the buy orders for the "Memory of Profit IX Headquarters" either with the trade view enabled on the map, or by the right click option "Trade With", see that it has a buy order for 12k - 25k Ore and a buy order for around 80k to 90k Ice.
2. Wait about 2 minutes for the last drop drones to deliver the current terraforming project.
3. Start the Import Water terraforming project.
4. Look at the available buy orders of the station once again. All other solid resources, such as Ore, Silicon, and Scrap Metal are gone. Miners currently delivering those goods fail their orders and wait around. Meanwhile, the buy order for Ice rises to around 130k to 140k.
5. Look at the station Logical Overview to see that the storage allocation for ice is fixed at 100k units, and the buy order should only be filling to that limit. The ore limit is 158,125 units, but it is not creating buy orders to fill to that amount. At this point changing the wares limit for Ice, Ore, or other solid resources has no real effect on the buy orders the station has.
6. Cancel the terraforming project and see the buy orders return to the expected values given the wares limits set.

Alternatively, starting the teleportation research also has an effect on the buy orders, making them differ from the expected given the wares limits, but not as significantly as the terraforming project does.

[Tranxalive]

We do not have access to the save on Google Drive.

Can you make it public?

[Zanthra]

I think I have fixed it now.

[Tranxalive]

I think this might be working as intended, strange and inconvenient as it may be.

Like the topic title says, Ice is a priority ware, and the station doesn't need that much Ore and Silicon to produce its wares, so it allocates a lower amount. The miners with those wares already should offload them once the station consumes enough wares to make room for them. It should operate smoothly after that.

Theoretically, you could try to add 2 million in Solid storage, the amount needed for the Ice, to fix the problem, but that's obviously incredibly expensive both in resources, and CPU resources.

[Zanthra]

I think this might be working as intended, strange and inconvenient as it may be.

Like the topic title says, Ice is a priority ware, and the station doesn't need that much Ore and Silicon to produce its wares, so it allocates a lower amount. The miners with those wares already should offload them once the station consumes enough wares to make room for them. It should operate smoothly after that.

Theoretically, you could try to add 2 million in Solid storage, the amount needed for the Ice, to fix the problem, but that's obviously incredibly expensive both in resources, and CPU resources.

The massive solid storage was how I worked around this in my game.

Working as intended certainly came to mind, but given how long it took to identify why my miners failed to work properly was difficult. The lack of any feedback or control, in the face of fairly consistent station trade behavior in the past made this quite astonishing.

It might be worth noting that my post, comes after many hours of configuring and reconfiguring the station due to the problems the station had importing Scrap Metal while running the second High Mass Teleportation research and the first terraforming project. Eventually giving up on trying to transport the scrap with miners entirely. It was only when the mining vessels stopped selling the ore and silicon at the start of the second terraforming project that I started to suspect it had anything to do with research or terraforming and finally was able to narrow down on what was going on!

Another possible improvement would be to change the prioritization for terraforming projects to only force storage maximums up to the amount needed for the largest drop drone rather than that required for the entire project. The storage needed to complete a terraforming project is vastly lower than the total storage required for all the materials for that project, as they are completed piecemeal.

[Tranxalive]

That's a good idea, but the only problem with that is that the Wharf module can build more than one at a time. If I remember correctly, it can build 8 things simultaneously.

It would need to be at least enough for 8, but also more that way the resources for the next set can be there immediately. So it'd need to be at least enough for 16. But why not have enough for a third? It'd be perfect in my opinion to have it be enough for 24 large drones.

Alternatively, it could be a Global Order type thing, or a slider, that way players could choose and control how much storage they could dedicate to Terraforming.

[Alan Phipps]

Wouldn't the number of drones etc that a wharf could build depend upon docked ships too? While terraforming from my PHQ with several S/M ship fabrication modules, I noticed that a lot of their S and M docking pads were already occupied by docked Player and NPC ships that had decided not to go anywhere else to trade etc just then. Unless they should get auto-sent to internal storage - which didn't seem to happen in my case in vanilla 7.xx.

[Zanthra]

That's a good idea, but the only problem with that is that the Wharf module can build more than one at a time. If I remember correctly, it can build 8 things simultaneously.

It would need to be at least enough for 8, but also more that way the resources for the next set can be there immediately. So it'd need to be at least enough for 16. But why not have enough for a third? It'd be perfect in my opinion to have it be enough for 24 large drones.

Alternatively, it could be a Global Order type thing, or a slider, that way players could choose and control how much storage they could dedicate to Terraforming.

To be completely fair, I wrote this as a bug report because I thought that there is a slider so that players can choose and control how much storage they can dedicate to Terraforming in the Logical overview of the station, and that it was being ignored when the terraforming project was running . A global order checkbox that made terraforming/research adjust storage like any other industry and be subject to the manual sliders the player has access to and understand already, rather than through some hidden storage Eminent Domain would be nice!