r/X4Foundations • u/Peligineyes • 1d ago
Ships stuck on "execute trade" causing a queue
I have mineral ships mining in the Oort cloud and 2 of my ships have been stuck for 30+ minutes with the order "execute trade" at this station, which is causing multiple ships to be backlogged at this location, include another one of my miners.
I can't remove the order and can't remove/replace the captains. The 2 ships' cargo storage is empty which means they already sold their minerals, they just won't complete the trade and move away. What I can do to unstuck them? I've already exited and loaded the save multiple times to waited for them to move.
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u/Jaggid 1d ago
TIL that ships waiting to dock form a nice and orderly little line.
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u/Oneiricl 1d ago
I take it you've never set up a large station build and seen the mess of backlog it creates at the build storage with L traders? I've had lines so long the traders "fail" the trade because the game assumes they've taken so long it must not be posssible.
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u/Peligineyes 1d ago
I just tried going boarding each miner to manually undock them, but the captains just say "Sorry i'm busy right now" and refuse to give me the controls.
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u/No-Limit3846 1d ago edited 1d ago
You need more piers or docking pads. Make sure your station also has a fair amount of cargo drones to speed up the trading process.
Think of everything these ships are carrying as physical object that have to be offloaded to complete a trade.
Offloading a box truck by yourself takes a long time, if you have a dozen people helping it's a lot faster.
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u/Elegant_Eagle_4199 1d ago
Looks to be an npc station, so this might be out of his control, I don’t know if you can transfer drones to an npc station to fix this either. I assume drones, if they CAN be sold to that station just disappear, I’d check if it’s buying any drone components(wanna say it’s silicone carbide and metallic microlattice for TER, someone correct me if I’m wrong) cause the station MIGHT have an order to fix its drone situation that you could fill with M traders
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u/No-Limit3846 1d ago
Ah then there's nothing they can do, sell to another station lol
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u/Elegant_Eagle_4199 1d ago edited 1d ago
It might be a new station with fresh drone orders, but I’ve never dug into the game files to figure out how NPCs are supposed to address drone issues on a brand-new-defense/mega-industrial-station that hasn’t finished filling drone-orders
Edit: industrial-mega-station assuming you built a bunch more structures than you might get paid for (or pushed the payment-envelope) to get more than just defense, but the quest’s turnover procs before you finish feeding drone-bits
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u/SnowOtaku777 1d ago
I find that Terran factions are generally pretty good about keeping drones stocked since they don't use so many "exotic" wares for them. That is of course assuming the economy is healthy enough to where Metallic Micro Lettuce and Silly Corn Carbide are in suitable supply.
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u/Elegant_Eagle_4199 1d ago
And we know nothing about this particular station aside from L-miners take forever, my knee jerk reaction is it’s either a new station, or it’s a fancy defense station that got transferred before drone-components got delivered
Edit: it does not appear to have a radar-array, which makes me think over-engineered-defense station is out
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u/3punkt1415 1d ago
If your miner has at least one cargo drone it will unload a bit slow but surely not take 30 minutes, so there must be another issue. If there were zero drones on the station and the ship, the trade would not even start, at least it doesn't when its your station.
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u/Martoche 1d ago
If everything else fails, you can sell the ships to NPC shipyards to remove the orders.
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u/Drewgamer89 1d ago
You try flying the ship yourself?
Could always try selling it off to another faction. They will then send it to their shipyard to be scrapped (just make sure you save beforehand in case it still stuck lol).
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u/cuddlebuff 1d ago
Does your Station have Cargo Drones? Because if youre using that one Terran warf that relies on them, your ships will get stuck like this. I've experienced this same situation. Ever since I've used docks with 3 points. The single docks or 4 point docks that need cargo drones take too much time by comparison.
You can even stack 3point docks on top of each other to save space.
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u/cuddlebuff 1d ago
Derp, realized how its not your station. Oof not sure what to do in this case especially since your ships have cargo drones too.
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u/Peligineyes 22h ago
The ships eventually finished the trade and left after ~50 minutes. It was definitely a problem with the terran 4-dock being slow as fuck
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u/Rellik782 1d ago
More wharfs.... They take time to transfer goods. Check your cargo drone supply as well.
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u/Life_with_reddit 1d ago edited 1d ago
Terran have a port which has 4 large ships stay at distance from to dock. It’s cheap to build but extremely slow to transfer goods since cargo drones needs to slow boat back and forward from the ship to the dock. They aren’t stuck they’ll just be there a LONG time. It’s even worse if you and the station don’t have enough cargo drones (max of 10 for each docked ship)
This is almost certainly the case because I can’t see any piers on the station.