Windows/Galaxy/NMS bug...whom to be mad at?

Archive NMS - Frontiers
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So, Win10 decides I need an update…I cooperate with the usual level of concern. Install and shut down, I’m going to bed. The next morning I go through the usual “no I do not want all these Microsoft apps to replace my stuff, thanks no thanks.” Otherwise, seems fine.

Until I try to play. GoG Galaxy refuses to launch. A quick look shows it is a familiar bug, and I am almost certain that it is the Windows update at the heart of it, but the workaround is simple enough.

Okay, cool, game starts.

My routine is that when I start a play session I immediately teleport around through all my mining bases and empty them.

They are all empty. That’s weird, wrong, and concerning. Timing says that this is all connected. Did they all reset to empty on the Galaxy relaunch? I’m…perplexed and need to keep an eye on this to make sure they are filling, but it’s not like I needed the products all that badly…

Half an hour later they no longer say empty. In fact, they say full. Even though there is nothing in them. Production shows stopped, which makes sense if they are full. But since they don’t show any product I can’t empty them, so they are gonna stay stopped. This is not great. Mining is really the core of this play, since I wanted automatic income while I concentrated on the new settlement stuff.

Ultimately, after warping didn’t fix it and exiting and restarting didn’t fix it and I was getting really concerned I found that rebuilding the mining units allowed them to restart. A simple move grab, set right back in place, reconnect, was sufficient. Upon reflection I am wondering if just disconnecting and reconnecting the power would have done it. I was thinking I would try that, but as it turned out fixing ONE somehow fixed them all. One gas collector and one mineral miner anyway. I have both at my main base and definitely had to fix them both, but when I teleported to the next base it was already working.

So I think this was a cascade from the Windows update. I’ve never had that Galaxy bug before so hopefully this was a one off. But it’s…unsettling. It will probably take a while before I fully trust in my mining operation again.

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It is possible that an old glitch has re-emerged. In the past, they would empty themselves when the player was away from the base. I have not done any mining since Frontiers launched except for the Exp 3 mission. I found mine empty once and working the next time. Keep an eye on it. May need to be reported.

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An update, and leaping to conclusions.

I went back into the game, after a couple hours of bowing to the demands of “real” life. Had just enough time to run the circuit of my mines. Results:

The oxygen silo was full, emptied normally, and seems fine. It’s at the main base and was one of the ‘fixed.’

The parafinium silo, also fixed at main base, was half+ full. It’s a weak source and that seems about right.

The phosphorus silo, which I just built post glitch, was half+ and seems fine.

All the rest, while they show as filling which is obviously better than the “full but can’t be emptied,” are at zero. So the “fixing one seems to have fixed them all” that sounded too good to be true…was. They aren’t really running. But now it seems like the fix has been verified. Whatever happened it just glitched all the operating equipment, but a remove/rebuild apparently solves the issue. Now to run around and do that to all the remaining equipment…just another day running an intersteller mining empire I guess.

I have decided to blame GoG Galaxy.

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The plot thickens…

I fixed all my mining equipment, then played around for a while exploring a planet, then checked on them. Sure enough, the faster ones are showing inventory. I was a little worried at the ones that aren’t, but some are not in really strong spots.

But then it struck me that I haven’t heard from my frigates in a while and that I might have missed an end of voyage message or two. And…hmmmm…in the hubbub with the broken mines I didn’t remember sending them out today at all, but I remember seeing blue as I ran through my freighter. They are all still out from last night???

I check on them.

They all have longer left to go on their missions than their mission duration was to begin with. They ‘lost’ about twenty-four hours. I think this timeslip could be what glitched my mining equipment. If the mines were trying to calculate how long they had been running and had a “current” time that was before the last time they were emptied I can see how that could break them.

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It does sound like an issue with internal timestamps, often caused by players changing system time in an attempt to speed things up. Not saying you have done this though, but the symptoms are similar, and results could even be worse.

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Yeah I think removing the lock file to get Galaxy working somehow altered the time stamps when Galaxy launched and replaced the lock file. At a guess this had something to do with GoG and Hello Games both being in a different day than I was at the time. As a west coast USian I am among the last to arrive in any given day and have seen similar complications before.

One of my frigate missions completed perfectly normal, other than having taken 29 hours on a five hour mission. The mines seem to all be working fine, since they were full this morning and are refilling as usual now. I think everything is back to normal.

Now that I have a pretty high confidence that I understand what happened I have reached the conclusion that if I had not been playing every day, or had otherwise just let enough time pass for the timeslip to catch up with itself, the problem would likely have self resolved.

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