Vanishing Manager ! - Probable fix in a future build after 3.0 b3.

[Nort The Fragrent]

Vanishing Manager !

I have built a trading station, Container, solid, & Liquid storage. No production modules.
It has 8 single piers, 8 Lux Docks, & enough habitation for 2000. ( Presumably habitation is not required, but helps to make the station look cool…
Having given the station 100,000,000 spending money and 8 trading ships. The Manager was doing well.

Then the station stoped, the storage was 1/3 used, 50 mill still in the bank. And a station manager no where to be found !

This has happened twice now, the manager just vanishes.

Is this a Bug? An infection? An undesirable position for a manager to hold down.

I have set the buy prices, and sell prices, for the stock, about 15 in total.
Any ideas why the manager Vanishes.

[The3rdWings]

well you can always offer him a better paycheck

[morikaane]

It's a known issue and has been documented in this thread--I guess it hasn't been resolved yet.

[Alan Phipps]

It is a fairly old type of issue that the devs are having trouble with in tracking down all likely causes and circumstances. Any new information or vanilla saves you can provide that may help them to investigate would be great.

EDIT: Ninja'd. Heh, same link - we think alike!

[morikaane]

Haha!

[Scott C.]

Has happened to me once. Didn't realize it wasn't somethin that was supposed to happen. Will be sure to help if I catch it again.

[Buzz2005]

they need a save before it happens

[Xenon_Slayer]

In hope of a miracle for us to track this down soon enough to fix it for the next test build I'll detail a bit more of what we may need.

First off, what I said in the other thread:

We are still looking for the root cause of this. We've seen the result of this issue on both player and NPC stations, with the latter getting some handling to prevent economic problems. As it was stated, it is a tricky one to track down as we're looking to catch "it" when it happens on any station in the universe. Some things which may help us narrow it down:
- have you visited the station recently?
- do you remember the station being involved in a fight?
- did you save/load nearby or on the station?

One theory was that it was due to missile area damage somehow destroying the office which a manager was in. That theory was shot down (pun very much intended), at least when we tried to brute-force it to happen.

While there are some events we can use to try and catch this, it's difficult to do so when it is relatively rare and apparently only happening for player stations (we fixed a NPC station case for 2.60). That's why a preceding save may be useful, giving us some chance for it to happen again.

@Nort, do you happen to remember if you visited the station recently before the manager disappeared?

[Nort The Fragrent]

Station build process,
The storage all got built first,
8 x Argon large container.
8 x Argon medium solid.
4 x Taladi small liquid.
4 x Taladi single pier.
8 x Taladi disk defence.
As this layer was almost complete, I had
4 x Pairanid Atlas dock at the piers ready to be Traders.
As the station had not yet got the flat docks built, I landed on an Atlas to then transfer the new manager into the station. This worked well.
At this stage I had not assigned any money to the station, keeping it closed !
This first layer then got
4 x Taladi Administration moduels.
4 x Taladi S Biome.
Then the second layer was built as a copy of the first.
Then 4 x Luxury docks, with a final Taladi M Biome on top to finish.
Once this was complete, I introduced the 100,000,000 to get the station working, me delivering the variety of products the station was to trade.

The station had not been under attack, and the trading was frenetic, so i added 4 more Flat docks to the build to cope with the traffic.

All was working very well indeed.

I went of to go to my Venture station to check out the ship that was still out on a venture !!

Then back to the Trading station, to watch the busy traffic around the station. All was still working well. No fighting, nothing out of the ordinary.

During this time I have used SETA
And have turned off the Hud and ship, to give a clear view.

It was one of the Ships that was not moving alerted me that something had gone wrong.
To find the Manager missing.
So I went and got a New manager, that got the station working again.

I have not been in any fighting, nor has the station been under attack.
My Faction Relations are mostly at 30, with no aggression in the game.

I save the game on every landing, and recently the game has unexpectedly crashed. This may be the problem !!

After saving on a Flat dock, The cursor stoped responding, and I could do nothing. The music was still working and the station people were still moving around, yet I could not do anything !

Perhaps it was the crash that removed the Manager, as I had to kill the computer to then restart the game.

[Doomdog19]

What am I doing wrong? This is the 2nd time my Manager has randomly disappeared from existence. The first time was last Sunday and now, exactly 1 week later, my Manager has dissappeared without a trace. I don't even see them on my employee list anymore. The first 1 was a 5 star Manager. I didn't think anything about it when the first one vanished. So, I put a random 1 star in their place. Now, I just lost a 4.5 star manager.

https://imgur.com/a/3TAPaKp - Link to show my Manager is gone.

What did I do wrong?

------------------

EDIT: I reloaded from a save of 5 hours ago and my Manager is there. The save that shows my manager being gone, I saved onto a new save slot. In case I need to send it off somewhere or something but what is happening?

[Alan Phipps]

@ Doomdog19: It may be worth linking the before save as well so that Xenon_Slayer could take a look. Also please try to answer his questions given in the active thread on this that I have merged your post with.

[Doomdog19]

Okay Alan, thank you.

RE: Xenon_Slayer

have you visited the station recently?
- I had the game running in the background, as usual, and was docked at the station.

do you remember the station being involved in a fight?
- The station /area was under attack by 4 SCA peashooters. I went to check on the game to see if my money flow is still proceeding according to plan. That's when I noticed my Manager was gone and the station was under attack. Note, I do not have shields on my station. Though, I am working on that now as I post this reply.

did you save/load nearby or on the station?
- The game may have autosaved by itself in the background but I know I didn't. my saves are currently selected for the 30 minute range mark.

The first time my manager disappeared I do not remember what was happening when it happened. I went to sleep and my manager was there and when I woke up to them being gone.

Now, on the 2nd time here, I was docked at the station after doing some errands in the universe. Fast forward 5 hours and noticed the station was under attack by peashooters and the manager was gone. The manager could've disappeared anywhere between the 5 hour time span I was and wasn't looking at it. Alan Phipps recommends I link a save of before the disappearance, so I will send you a PM with my save file. It will be from my Microsoft Onedrive. This is the save I'm currently on after reloading from a 5 hour save and I am continuing off of this save file.

TLDR:
- I was docked at the station
- The station /area was under attack by 4 SCA peashooters when I noticed
- The game may have autosaved by itself in the background but I know I didn't. As I had check on it from leaving it running.
- The save file I'm linking is the file that I reloaded with and have been playing / saving on now since it happened today.

[Alan Phipps]

@ Doomdog19: Save received thanks. Let's see what the devs can hopefully find out from it.

[Xenon_Slayer]

It's a bit early for a Christmas miracle, but I think we've traced this down and finally fixed it. Hopefully, we can get it into the next build.

Thanks for all the details and saves provided. This was a really tricky thing to reproduce, even once we knew the ultimate cause. If I were to suggest how to avoid it in the current builds, don't fly around the borders of your stations too much. It think bigger stations with larger bounds may trigger it to happen more often, but positioning in the sector also plays a part.

Unfortunately, those managers already lost are forever gone. o7

[kaalund]

well my HQ mannager has been missing since i build the dock and assigned him to the station. game started in 3.0 beta 1, no mods. do somebody want a savegame of that?

[Alan Phipps]

@ kaalund: The promised fix is in a build after 3.0 b3 and the public beta is still at 3.0 B3 just now so there is no surprise that this isn't fixed in the beta just yet.

Anyway, that is more for discussion in the public beta forum since it concerns the beta.