Possible Ware Basket bug

[Scoob]

Hi,

In my current modified game - using the Reemergence Mod plus others - I think I've identified a BUG with Ware Baskets.

It appears that if you set a Custom Ware basket, but restrict a ware that the Station deems a priority, Station-assigned trade ships will not trade AT ALL.

I had a Station that produces Energy Cells, Claytronics and Hull Parts. This station supplies my station building needs (closed-loop) and traditionally works really well. Station-assigned traders by default both BUY resources this station needs and SELL any products. Both Purchases and Sales are restricted to my faction alone.

This possible bug with Ware baskets came up in a specific situation:

My Station had LOTS of produce to sell, but was critically short on one resource. The Manager for this station had decided to make a certain resource a PRIORITY (fair, in isolation), so the station-assigned ships would trade nothing BUT that resource. However, I wanted to ensure they kept supplying a build site. To achieve this I set a custom Ware basket for each ship, ONLY selecting Energy Cells, Claytronics and Hull Parts - de-selecting any RESOURCES including that high-priority one.

So, at this point all Station-assigned Ships are set to only sell Energy Cells, Claytronics and Hull Parts to me, via a combination of trade rules (Only My Faction) and a Custom Ware basket. They will not buy anything. I also set this "High Priority" resource to "No Trading" (aka restrict ALL factions including mine). When looking at Trade Offers at this station, I ONLY see those for Energy Cells, Claytronics and Hull Parts SALES. No BUY offers at all, as desired. Everything looks good.

Thinking all was set 100% correctly, I watched for the Station-assigned traders delivering to the build site. They did not. One after the other they failed with the "No valid trades" message, despite there DEFINITELY being valid trades in range. Basically, station-assigned traders were all broken, doing nothing at all.

After much playing around, changing settings etc. I found the culprit - the custom Ware basket. Setting the Ware basket back to Automatic almost immediately saw the Station-assigned ships load up on Energy Cells and Claytronics, shipping them to the destination build site. Why would restricting one ware, prevent trading of ALL wares?

In conclusion, it appears that using a Custom Ware basket to restrict a ware that the game has forced to High Priority blocks ALL trading. Even if that ware also has various trade restrictions in place to prevent trading. I even restricted the storage space for this high priority ware to 1 (lowest we can set) yet the game still insisted it was high priority.

Note: I'm not 100% sure this isn't a mod issue* as, in my current game, the ware in question is a custom modded one, designed to act a bit like Workforce, boosting productivity. It's basically like a "Secondary Resource" we had in earlier games in that respect. I'm trying to set up a scenario in my 100% vanilla game to reproduce this. I plan to take an existing fully-working Station - with both imports and exports - then manually unload all of one resource, then block trading of that resource. I'll then see if any station-assigned traders with restricted Ware baskets suffer the same issue. It'll take a while to set up, and I've already largely run out of time today (and perhaps the Weekend, sadly) so I thought I'd throw this out there to see if anyone else had noticed this quirk.

* I have spoken to another player who says they've experienced it in vanilla since first typing this. So, I'm hopefully I can recreate it in vanilla.

I have seen issues where Station-assigned ships will trade nothing BUT a high priority resource in my vanilla game already, but the ware was of course enabled in the Ware basket. This was at the expense of production though. I.e. I have LESS of Resource A (vs. storage cap), so it's a Priority, I have more of Resource B so it's not, however, it's lack of Resource B that's halting production due to ware A being consumed in very low volumes, whereas Ware B is consumed in very high volumes per cycle. I've not previously tried restricting a high-priority Resource via the Ware basket in this way before though. That I think is the route of this bug.