What with Collector Limpets? "Orbiting" behaviour
- Thread starter Scoob
- Start date
A known issue? Thanks for confirming. DB usually drops me a line when such things crop up, but I guess now he's stepped back a bit he didn't this time...
Initially, it looked they were collecting, dropping off and then orbiting around my ship. Then I released a couple that started orbiting right away. Then I had some that went to collect, came back but I didn't get the "material collected" message and they started orbiting.
Is there a pattern to how they fail? I can go back to manual collection if needed, don't want to lose something valuable because a limpet has gone crazy.
The new behaviour annoys me immensely. I used to be able to tell if a limpet is going to go for another grab or just hang around by it's sensor footprint and sound, now with the constant movement, I can't read my limpets at all. I don't know if there's just grade 1 mats out there, things on my block list, TDCs, if I boost I lose the limpet due to the hilariously small range, is it going, is it staying, what?
I'll be damned if I'm gonna check my contacts list every 5 seconds when scooping stuff, does anyone know of another reliable way of telling what my limpets are going at any given moment?
Classical if it ain't broke don't fix it moment.
pretty sure they orbit because of the previous issue of limpets not dropping off materials and "getting stuck" on the ramp for a while before dropping off and meanwhile blocking other limpets coming in for a dropoff. It's from the January patch. The patch notes mentions the issue spesificly "being fixed", and this is the fix.*
Works fine for me and have collected hundreds of materials and even more pods etc since and haven't had a single issue
*all of the above is how I understood it
Works fine for me and have collected hundreds of materials and even more pods etc since and haven't had a single issue
*all of the above is how I understood it
I've never personally had that issue, was it a fairly recent one? Other than allow the game to update and check it still launches, I've barely played in a good six months or so at least.
I think the bug appeared around 6 months ago around the end of the Titan war.
Heh, I made exactly the same thread a couple of weeks ago.
I think you've got two separate things going on there.
Firstly, limpets orbiting your ship is new. It's just what limpets do, now, instead of parking underneath your ship and, potentially, blocking the cargo scoop.
As for not dropping the loot, I think that's probably the standard "transaction server" problem, where ED can't figure out how to let a player take ownership of stuff in-game.
Dunno if it's just luck or if attempts have been made to fix it but, for me, it was really bad 3 or 4 months ago but recently it's been almost non-existent.
I had one limpet, today, that went to collect something and then just sat there.
I waited for all my other limpets to finish up (they were off in the opposite direction) then went to see what it was doing and it wasn't near debris or having any other obvious problem but it'd just zoned-out.
That's the first time I've noticed a problem in a while though so, not terrible.
S'funny but I tend to overlook some bugs as in-universe equipment malfunctions.
When a docking computer crashes me into the side of a station, or the odd limpet loses it's marbles, or a turret accidentally shoots a cop-ship, I tend to accept that's just "equipment failure" rather than a game-bug.
I think there is a new issue. I think if you're nearly full on a material and 2 of your limpets go grab one of each you get one mat and one useless limpet. I'm not sure what the previous behavior was (possibly the drone self-destructed) but I don't think that used to be a problem. 
I think there is a new issue. I think if you're nearly full on a material and 2 of your limpets go grab one of each you get one mat and one useless limpet. I'm not sure what the previous behavior was (possibly the drone self-destructed) but I don't think that used to be a problem.
I did wonder about that.
You're almost full of something.
Two limpets head out to grab another of that thing.
One delivers it and the other one can't because you're now full?
Doesn't matter how full or not you are. They are definitely bugged - my finger is pointed at server inadequacy.
There are two things going on here.
Back when limpets hung out doing literally nothing - standing still under the ship -when they had nothing to do, a bug was introduced somewhen around Ascendancy time. Many people suspected this was server inadequacy, indeed. It seems like once the limpet, the ship, the instance, and the server had dropped the baton somewhere between them, that limpet would be effectively blind and deaf and would not go off to collect things because it simply didn't know about the things.
You could sometimes prod them back into life by doing something radical with the ship or the limpet, like reversing the ship into the limpet deliberately, and this would then cause them to reassess current state of the instance, and notice the uncollected thing.
After the release where a fix for this was mentioned in the release notes, things improved. Now they would sit around much less often. As part of this fix, FDev introduced the idle orbit behaviour so they never sit right under the hatch. I assume this somehow made them less likely to get into this blind and deaf state somehow.
But there is a residual bug where either the limpet or the collection target still fail to talk to the server for whatever reason and either the universe becomes invisible to them or vice versa. This was way way less often for a while but of course now we're back to having too much pressure on the servers because Trailblazers has stretched what the servers are asked to do, so I think the frequency of this has crept up again.
But the circling is intended behaviour and it is a part of the mitigation of the original, much more frequent bug.
Back when limpets hung out doing literally nothing - standing still under the ship -when they had nothing to do, a bug was introduced somewhen around Ascendancy time. Many people suspected this was server inadequacy, indeed. It seems like once the limpet, the ship, the instance, and the server had dropped the baton somewhere between them, that limpet would be effectively blind and deaf and would not go off to collect things because it simply didn't know about the things.
You could sometimes prod them back into life by doing something radical with the ship or the limpet, like reversing the ship into the limpet deliberately, and this would then cause them to reassess current state of the instance, and notice the uncollected thing.
After the release where a fix for this was mentioned in the release notes, things improved. Now they would sit around much less often. As part of this fix, FDev introduced the idle orbit behaviour so they never sit right under the hatch. I assume this somehow made them less likely to get into this blind and deaf state somehow.
But there is a residual bug where either the limpet or the collection target still fail to talk to the server for whatever reason and either the universe becomes invisible to them or vice versa. This was way way less often for a while but of course now we're back to having too much pressure on the servers because Trailblazers has stretched what the servers are asked to do, so I think the frequency of this has crept up again.
But the circling is intended behaviour and it is a part of the mitigation of the original, much more frequent bug.
Yeah, sadly it still doesn't work as it should. For the most part in couple of last months I tried using them targetted instead on their own free will, which somewhat fixed the problem, now they bug out even that way. I still believe it's problem of server inadequacy more than limpets themselves - you want to circumvent this problem by picking up cargo directly with cargo hatch? Well, enjoy your haul getting damaged/destroyed over your own ship because hatch refuses to take the cargo in. Horrible idea, this "sync everything with server" design.
My guess would be that the "circling" was introduced to avoid a logjam created when a limpet loses it's marbles.
As long as a faulty limpet starts "circling" instead of just sitting under the cargo hatch, other functional limpets can continue to deliver stuff.
Can we go back to when limpets didn't lose their marbles instead? 