[CoH] Station miners mining one resource to the virtual exclusion of another - serious bug - Improved in a future build.

[Gregorovitch]

I refer to the attached saves which give two reacent views of the problem at the same station, Weapons Parts Factory 18 Bn (in 18 Billion).

https://www.dropbox.com/s/dkmh38jqtxcxc ... 01.gz?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6v81jl3r177hf ... 02.gz?dl=0

The station in question requires both methane and helium to make supercoolant and graphene. The two gas miners are and have been focused almost exclusively on mining methane and very rarely gather helium. In fact from what I see they will refuse to gather helium until the storage for methane is actually full, as evidenced from second save where you can see the miners still have methane left over in their holds having been unable to unload it.

They should obviously not be doing this, they should be trying to fill up both methane and helium storage roughly equally. The problem is that this extreme reluctance to gather helium is causing the station to stop making supercoolant when it runs out of helium (as it will do between the first and second example saves).

Not all stations appear to be plagued by this problem, it is not clear what lies behind it. However the Steam board is currently on fire about this issue. Several players have had unmitigated trouble from it, especially getting miners to gather both ore and silicon in reasonably equal quantities in Terran space. Players are having to go to extreme and ridiculous measures to get round this problem such as building separate silicon and ore mining facilities separate again form their main stations or fleets of independent miners on repeat orders to supply their stations.

In most cases I've seen reported the situation is the same: miners will mine either ore or silicon exclusively until storage for that resource is full and only then gather the other resource, immediately switching back to the first resource as soon as any storage for it becomes available even though the station is still starved of the second and storage is all but empty. Obviously this is bringing their stations to a grinding halt. Continuously and repeatedly. They are also having to manually empty their station miners holds of excess ores to make space to gather the other variety. On a minute by minute basis, struggling to constantly monitor the situation.

This is the same situation as I have here in these examples I've posted albeit with methane and helium. I would classify this as bordering on game breaking. I am not disposed to spend my time and money building separate graphene and supercoolant factories to deal with this, I have no plans to set up such stations in the foreseeable future. That is not an acceptable work around.

[Imuniser]

There is another similar post where other similar posts have been mentioned

viewtopic.php?f=180&t=436388&sid=cd4130 ... b3c95edf1d

[Takichi]

Here is a unmodified Savegame: https://easyupload.io/7r2bm4
100% without any Mods.
Terran Computronik Substrate Only Focus on Ore with 90% of its own Ships and gets most of its Silicon via AI-Trader and Build Silicon Mining Storag at Asteroid Belt.
Yes i am Aware of the Fact that 6 Computronik Substrate Buildings are considereable as "Mega Faction" since they need 100k+ of Ressources, but i testet it througly and build it slowls upwards from 1 Building. Up until 5 Prouction Buildings it was overflowing with Ore and never got more thann 1-2k Silicon by itself either. I also saw that behaviour on other Stations which need 2 Ressources of the Same Type (Solid/Gas) but it wasnt as noticable considering their relativly "low" need of Ressources. Still before 4.0 and Mining Changes that was never an Issues because the Station Manager, at least in my games(i never used any kind of mods) would set up their Miner around 50/50 for the needed ressources. In 4.0 they simply dont do that anymore. The HEAVY Focus on 1 Ressource First is a massiv issuse which doesnt allow you to do reasonable Planning of how much you need if half the Minning Fleet doesnt get used or just idles around because they got the "wrong" Ressource Storaged in their Ship before their Command gets Changed by Manager.
Station Miners should be used by Demmand and not to get 1 Ressource to Max Storage before another.

[Tiliam]

Have seen the exact behaviour in my unmodded game. Impacts silicon, methane, and hydrogen with ore, ice, and helium being mined to overflowing levels (Terran station building all terran resources). Issue is compounded by the fact that that my 30 or so miners all went for ore or ice, and were only able to empty maybe 10% of their holds into the station, clogging up their storage.

I had to fix it with dedicated mining stations for 1 ore and gas each - i transferred my miners from the mega station to these dedicated ones, and after manually making sure the ratio of miners made sense against the ratio of resources needed immediately met my resource needs. So it is not an issue with too few miners as some people suggest (nor lack of storage, of which I have many L storage in my mega station). Using resource probes did not resolve the issue either, despite having a lot deployed showing good yields of all resources needed across the mining sectors.

[Falcrack]

I hope that the interim solution of using an intermediate mining station to get around this bug is not the official solution to this resource prioritization bug. This issue has caused me to stop playing on my main save.

[VincentTH]

@MeToo. Miners only mine ore, leaving station starved in Silicon. I have to use Repeat orders to get around the problem.

The problem seems to be one of the Terran commodity (Computronic Substrate) requiring 10k for each of Ore and Silicon per batch , so the station satisfies the Ore requirement for other products with lesser input amount of Silicon first.

[sentenced-1989]

@MeToo. Miners only mine ore, leaving station starved in Silicon. I have to use Repeat orders to get around the problem.

The problem seems to be one of the Terran commodity (Computronic Substrate) requiring 10k for each of Ore and Silicon per batch , so the station satisfies the Ore requirement for other products with lesser input amount of Silicon first.

Same issue, but in my case they focus on Silicon only, I have about 90% Silicon full and Ore only comes in from NPC traders. Have 6 large miners and 6 small ones for 2 of each Terran Production modules (non food ones).

[Imperial Good]

Posted in another topic but adapted for here.

Place some resource probes in nearby sectors with reasonable amounts of yield. I am guessing one or more of the required mineables are not considered available and so only getting mined once storage of the available wares is completely full.

As a DLC orientated example imagine a mining base in Jupiter. This base can mine Silicon from Asteroid Belt as Asteroid Belt has a non-trivial yield of silicon. Placing resource probes around Asteroid Belt will mark Silicon as available for miners to mine. However although Ore is technically available in Asteroid Belt it is only available in trivial amounts so the station considers Asteroid Belt as not having ore available. As such even though the station may need both Silicon and Ore it will not mine Ore until Silicon storage is completely full since it only has Silicon available. The solution in this case is to drop a few resource probes in Getsu Fune next door which has enough yield to be considered as Ore being available. After doing this the station will attempt to balance mining of both Ore from Getsu Fune and Silicon from Asteroid Belt in waves that with enough solid storage should keep continuous production even under high demands.

[Raevyan]

Posted in another topic but adapted for here.

Place some resource probes in nearby sectors with reasonable amounts of yield. I am guessing one or more of the required mineables are not considered available and so only getting mined once storage of the available wares is completely full.

As a DLC orientated example imagine a mining base in Jupiter. This base can mine Silicon from Asteroid Belt as Asteroid Belt has a non-trivial yield of silicon. Placing resource probes around Asteroid Belt will mark Silicon as available for miners to mine. However although Ore is technically available in Asteroid Belt it is only available in trivial amounts so the station considers Asteroid Belt as not having ore available. As such even though the station may need both Silicon and Ore it will not mine Ore until Silicon storage is completely full since it only has Silicon available. The solution in this case is to drop a few resource probes in Getsu Fune next door which has enough yield to be considered as Ore being available. After doing this the station will attempt to balance mining of both Ore from Getsu Fune and Silicon from Asteroid Belt in waves that with enough solid storage should keep continuous production even under high demands.

Bernd Said resource probes are OPTIONAL and one does not need to place them though? Also placing probes causes more problems than they solve currently.

[Gregorovitch]

Posted in another topic but adapted for here.

Place some resource probes in nearby sectors with reasonable amounts of yield. I am guessing one or more of the required mineables are not considered available and so only getting mined once storage of the available wares is completely full.

As a DLC orientated example imagine a mining base in Jupiter. This base can mine Silicon from Asteroid Belt as Asteroid Belt has a non-trivial yield of silicon. Placing resource probes around Asteroid Belt will mark Silicon as available for miners to mine. However although Ore is technically available in Asteroid Belt it is only available in trivial amounts so the station considers Asteroid Belt as not having ore available. As such even though the station may need both Silicon and Ore it will not mine Ore until Silicon storage is completely full since it only has Silicon available. The solution in this case is to drop a few resource probes in Getsu Fune next door which has enough yield to be considered as Ore being available. After doing this the station will attempt to balance mining of both Ore from Getsu Fune and Silicon from Asteroid Belt in waves that with enough solid storage should keep continuous production even under high demands.

This is not an acceptable solution IMHO for two reasons:

1. In my example here, if what you quote here is indeed the reason for the problem, there is no solution to it because 18 Billion has a methane patch offering a ginormous yield of 2.4 per km^3 whereas the yeilds for helium locally are all in the 0.0xx per km^3 range. There is no helium patch remotely comparable to 2.4 per km^3 yield in order to effect this proposed solution strategy in my case.

2. It is not acceptable IMHO for the player to be burdened with having to search and probe asteroid belts and gas clouds to the extent required to identify specific patches that fall within the (currently unknown to the player) yield concentration differential limits required, and then work through all the required calculations, to avoid this behaviour.

I noticed devs commenting on other threads that station miners should mine in accordance with station needs and by implication not relative yield concentrations between resources or considerations of "notional profit". IMHO station miners should mine the required resources irrespective of yield concentrations however long it takes them to do so. The only requirement should be that there is ANY of the required resource available at all.

We can deal with slow mining due to low resource yield concentrations. We can't deal with a flat refusal to mine a resource at all.

Like @Falcrack I have stopped playing CoH and won't be starting again until and unless this issue is resolved.

[Takichi]

Posted in another topic but adapted for here.

Place some resource probes in nearby sectors with reasonable amounts of yield. I am guessing one or more of the required mineables are not considered available and so only getting mined once storage of the available wares is completely full.

As a DLC orientated example imagine a mining base in Jupiter. This base can mine Silicon from Asteroid Belt as Asteroid Belt has a non-trivial yield of silicon. Placing resource probes around Asteroid Belt will mark Silicon as available for miners to mine. However although Ore is technically available in Asteroid Belt it is only available in trivial amounts so the station considers Asteroid Belt as not having ore available. As such even though the station may need both Silicon and Ore it will not mine Ore until Silicon storage is completely full since it only has Silicon available. The solution in this case is to drop a few resource probes in Getsu Fune next door which has enough yield to be considered as Ore being available. After doing this the station will attempt to balance mining of both Ore from Getsu Fune and Silicon from Asteroid Belt in waves that with enough solid storage should keep continuous production even under high demands.

If you check my save you see that i do have Probes in each sector my miner can reach. And for me they Focus only on Ore even in Asteroid Belt, they ignore Silicon for 90% of the Time even with Probes which sho 4km³ or above in Silicon. Even droping a Probe with 14km³+ doesnt change that, its definetly a AI Problem here. Nice you try to find a work around but that is basicly the same as using a "1 Solid/Gas Ressource Only" Station. Its ok as Workaround but shouldnt be the solution.

[FenrisWolf1981]

Well i had the same problem with my bigger stations, and took a look into the ai scripts. Found some behavior i did not really agree with and changed it.

viewtopic.php?f=181&t=436446

Modified now but working for me, miners now don't just look for the best mining spots, they try to fill the lowest resource in station cargo. And trader don't just look for critical resource shortness and wait if they can't buy it, they drill down the buy list now in that case.

[Gregorovitch]

Is....

<replace sel="//do_if[@value='$probe.currentyield.{$evalware}.exists and ($locamount ge $bestsector.averagemaxyield.{$evalware}.count)']/@value">$probe.currentyield.{$evalware}.exists and ($locamount gt 0)</replace>

what you changed it to or what is was?

If it's what you changed it to what was it?

[Imperial Good]

Bernd Said resource probes are OPTIONAL and one does not need to place them though? Also placing probes causes more problems than they solve currently.

Optional, yes, optimal, no.

Resource probes boost the mining speed of ships mining in the zone they are placed in. They also are used to help better manage regional depletion as low yield probes will be ignored giving the zone time to recover before being remined. So far it seems spamming resource probes in every zone that a lot of miners gather in gives best results.

1. In my example here, if what you quote here is indeed the reason for the problem, there is no solution to it because 18 Billion has a methane patch offering a ginormous yield of 2.4 per km^3 whereas the yeilds for helium locally are all in the 0.0xx per km^3 range. There is no helium patch remotely comparable to 2.4 per km^3 yield in order to effect this proposed solution strategy in my case.

It uses averages per zone. A lot of these high yield sectors are unfavourable due to low averages. This is why The Reach is a hot spot for ore mining since it has a very high ore average compared with Asteroid Belt.

2. It is not acceptable IMHO for the player to be burdened with having to search and probe asteroid belts and gas clouds to the extent required to identify specific patches that fall within the (currently unknown to the player) yield concentration differential limits required, and then work through all the required calculations, to avoid this behaviour.

Yeh it would be nice if miners had the option to automatically drop the probes. Currently manually doing it from map view every place a lot of miners gather is time consuming.

We can deal with slow mining due to low resource yield concentrations. We can't deal with a flat refusal to mine a resource at all.

You cannot since if 100 miners try to mine the same spot you get the same as just 3 or so miners doing so. This is why resource probe spam seems to be the way to go currently as it forces miners to spread out more and not try to mine depleted zones.

If you check my save you see that i do have Probes in each sector my miner can reach. And for me they Focus only on Ore even in Asteroid Belt, they ignore Silicon for 90% of the Time even with Probes which sho 4km³ or above in Silicon. Even droping a Probe with 14km³+ doesnt change that, its definetly a AI Problem here. Nice you try to find a work around but that is basicly the same as using a "1 Solid/Gas Ressource Only" Station. Its ok as Workaround but shouldnt be the solution.

I also notice in your save the following problems.

• Silicon is not restricted trade. As such if NPCs are fulfilling it you cannot make a fair statement that it is not being supplied.
• The station has far too little solid storage. Running at full speed it empties storage in under 20 minutes from full. Getting stations to work with such small buffer times is near impossible from personal experience and so I would recommend 3 to 5 solid storage modules for over an hour of production worth of input.
• A lot of your miners are low skilled. Low skilled miners are painfully slow, especially without resource probe in the zone they are mining. Even with all non assigned miners assigned to the station and mining silicon they struggle to mine it fast enough.
• Due to a lack of resource probes miners are saturating the same highly mined locations result in them effectively being idle. This also seems to be discouraging silicon mining. Resource probes encourage mining in the local area, or not mining in the local area if the zone is low yield. Resource probes also give a bonus to mining speed in the zone they are in, important for Silicon due to how slowly Silicon mines.

What I did was assign all the non assigned miners to the station, add 4 more L solid storage modules to the station, restrict silicon to self trade, and then get a scout ship to spam resource probes in Asteroid Belt everywhere I see 2 or more mineral miners operating. After doing this the computronic substrate factory was mining both silicon and ore as needed, was running all 6 modules constantly and overall was struggling to keep up with Energy Cell usage. When all Energy Cells were depleted I stopped playing.

[VincentTH]

For my case, it is not whether I use probes or not, I placed probes everywhere, to no avail.

The problem I see is that the miners do not mine on need, rather on what is listed first. For me, it is Ice: the reserved storage for Ice is full, yet about 7 of 10 L-size miners are full of ice, save some 100 for both Silicon and Ore.

My temporarily solution is to __manually__ go over each miner and drop the ice to force them to mine properly. The proper fix is probably straight-forward, IMHO:
(1) don't mine a certain type of mineral when the storage of that mineral is 60% or more, while there are other types of minerals that are less than 50%.
(2) Say ore is low at the moment, but don't allocate 90% of returning miners to that type of minerals (ore). The --projected-- amount currently in progress for ore should be taken into calculation.

[Gregorovitch]

1. In my example here, if what you quote here is indeed the reason for the problem, there is no solution to it because 18 Billion has a methane patch offering a ginormous yield of 2.4 per km^3 whereas the yeilds for helium locally are all in the 0.0xx per km^3 range. There is no helium patch remotely comparable to 2.4 per km^3 yield in order to effect this proposed solution strategy in my case.

It uses averages per zone. A lot of these high yield sectors are unfavourable due to low averages. This is why The Reach is a hot spot for ore mining since it has a very high ore average compared with Asteroid Belt.

That's very interesting and all but it's not telling me a) why exactly my two gas miners are only gathering methane and no helium or b) WTF I'm supposed to do about it

[Imuniser]

From what I have gathered from several threads:

a) why 2 resources are being mined and the third is not? The managers consider the area average and if the area average for a specific resource is below a certain amount (nobody knows the amount, it is a guessing game) they will simply ignore it and concentrate on mining those amounts above the threshold
b) what to do? To get them to mine you have to do the exact opposite of what any good manager would do. Ban the resource not being mined from being purchased from other factions (doh!) and carpet probe the heck out of the sector probably to the point where you won't be able to differentiate between probes and ships in the map view (make sure you turn off display resources in the map filters else it will be a even bigger mess)

All the while none of the developers are saying a single thing about it.

[Archaeosis]

Mining AI as clearly and succinctly explained above was broken in 4.0 - managers now ignore one or more resources because of crummy mistakes in the AI scripts.

Unfortunately a number of vocal people including several moderators in the community are pretending it's not broken, writing essay-length posts about how all the issues are because of laughable user error by ignorant players neglecting to do this or that, not placing enough mining probes which are broken and frankly unpleasant additions to gameplay even if they worked as intended, etc. This is a frustrating distraction and wastes everyone's time.

I worry that Egosoft actually believe their new mining gameplay update is excellent and are ignoring these reports, while people like FenrisWolf are having to do their jobs and go in and fix the silly but really rather simple AI script errors that Egosoft should have fixed halfway through the beta. It doesn't even look particularly difficult so I can only think Egosoft don't bother because they believe it's not broken.

[BigBANGtheory]

Resource probes boost the mining speed of ships mining in the zone they are placed in. They also are used to help better manage regional depletion as low yield probes will be ignored giving the zone time to recover before being remined. So far it seems spamming resource probes in every zone that a lot of miners gather in gives best results.

I agree that is how I would expect it to work and from what I have observed for Gas and Ore it does, but for some reason (in my case at least) for Silicon its just not working like that my miners don't appear to be applying that intelligence. Is it a bug or is it intended I've no way of knowing but I would request please someone takes a look for Silicon it feels like something isn't working right.

[FenrisWolf1981]

Is....

<replace sel="//do_if[@value='$probe.currentyield.{$evalware}.exists and ($locamount ge $bestsector.averagemaxyield.{$evalware}.count)']/@value">$probe.currentyield.{$evalware}.exists and ($locamount gt 0)</replace>

what you changed it to or what is was?

If it's what you changed it to what was it?

I simply removed the "($locamount ge $bestsector.averagemaxyield.{$evalware}.count)" check.

As long as your probes are NOT placed in the best spots (and if you have, this will change, since now the resources will be reduced over time on this spot), the whole sector will be skipped. So what happens after the script evaluates the priorities. One example:

Station needs ice, ore but not silicons. Ice is nearly empty. The script creates a priority list: ice -> ore -> silicon. It will iterate through all sectors where you have probes and check for ice first. If your probes are not in the best positions, the sectors with ice will be skipped, others sectors with not enough ice to mine too. Even though there is ice at your probes, it is not enough for the script to send a miner there. After that iteration, it will continue with ore ... and then silicons.

But thats not what I want. Even though i did not find the best spot to mine and put a probe there (or it WAS the best spot, but has been drained over time), i want them to harvest what i really need. And here comes the patch. $bestsector has been found, so there is your best bet to get what you want. I don't want it to cancel just because there are not hundred of probes (and this could happen in large sectors).

After i removed the check in my save, over time my stations recovered and the income was stable again. Sure i had to get more miner, since the universe is a little low on minerals now, but it works like before. Only problem was, that many miners where simply in idle mode with cargo's full of resources i did not need, waiting for the station to reduce the cargo and deliver it. After i discarded some miners cargo manually, they instantly started to get what i need.

So in my opinion, you have three options.
1 - Drop a probe simply everywhere, it won't work otherwise. It's how the script works, code does not lie .
2 - wait for an official patch for this.
2 - Use the mod / patch.