PSA: Station traders DO NOT WORK

[Finn]

I have wondered for hours now why my profits are so bad and now I found out. Station traders will stop working. I have a trader that sat next to a station that actually wants to buy my stuff for FIVE hours and does not act. "Searching for trades". My sell price is also far below what they offer. STATION TRADERS DONT WORK!

[Flavalicious]

They do, but there are alot of factors that determine if your trader makes the trip or not, and the UI to show this leaves a bit to be desired lol. The only way ive gotten things to operate smooth is to have an excess of every part of the process. Loads of extra storage, loads of extra station funding, 2 or 3 times the number of traders i should have to use for a station that size. I can share your frustration though lol

[Astasia]

I have one M trader selling the wares from one of my 4xMRE station complexes and they have done that job just fine for dozens without any issues.

[Predie AUT]

If its a L trader you need cargo drones because not every station have some

[Flavalicious]

I feel like maybe i should make a fast 5 minute youtube clip on how to get this stuff sorted. lol. Ive only had 1 major problem and it was the game being stupid, but aside from that my logistics have been very smooth

[Finn]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2435514629
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2435514583
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2435514547
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2435514502
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2435514453

Here you can see my station, I sell all that stuff for very low prices. I don't buy anything (except from my own miners). My manager is 4 stars and has plenty of stations in range. I have hundets of satellites around to see current prices and demands. Yet that ship sat idle for 5 hours "Searching for trades"

PS: I have only 5 traders or so, so it shouldn't be a matter of no trades available for that specific trader.

[Finn]

Also ALL of my 5 traders have not made a trade for approx. 4.5 hours. Something is very wrong here.

[--T-a-u-r-u-s--]

did you check demand for your selling wears? you selling it for cheapest probably all other station are filled storages and sell them cheaper too and closer than you

my as well stuck for couple hours there were no demand all shipyards were well supplied and all station as well

[Finn]

Yes I did, there is demand for my wares and the prices are way above what I demand.

[Icebox]

Check and see if you have auto resupply of Drones enabled at the station overview. If you do, turn it off and your traders will start working again. Let me know if that works

[Oddible]

OK, your screenshots look good so far, need a couple more.

1. Show the Behavior tab for the Trade Ship
2. Show the Crew tab for the Trade STATION
3. Show the map with Hull Parts and Plasma Conductors selected in the filter (currently we cannot see demand for these).
4. A question: Do you have satellites at every station within a couple sectors?

[Flavalicious]

Theres something off about your screenshots. Its impossible that your facilities were producing product for 5 hours with whats being shown on your transaction record and then in your logistics tab. You were definitely short some production materials for a bunch of that time, otherwise you'd have a few thousand of each product or a bunch of sales records.

But your traders, and AI traders wont come buy stuff from your station unless you have enough in your storage to make it a full trip. Like they wont send a medium class freighter to buy 30 of something, they want to come and buy 400. for example my terran computronics factory produces something like 96 quantity in a cycle, but a trader wont come and buy it until I hit around 300 quantity, and then they buy 214 basically everytime. But never before i pass that 300 mark.

[Astasia]

You say your trade ships have done nothing for 5 hours, yet you are producing 6000 hull parts per hour and only have 2800 in storage, with 700 reserved to be sold, similar situation with your plasma conductors. What exactly is your problem? It sounds like your trade ships don't need to do anything so they aren't.

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Finn:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2435514629
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2435514583
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2435514547

I think you problem here is that both the hull parts and the plasma converters you screenshotted are are set to manual sell amount of 1. In other words you've instructed your station ships sell only one of them.

I think if you take all these instructions away and set everything back to default settings it will work fine. TBH unless you've got a very strong reason for doing so and you know exactly what you are doing messing a round too much with these station settings can do more harm than good.

I always leave pricing for end products on automatic. This way you always find the best market prices as your stock rises and your customers stocks fall. It means you don't have to be looking at what price you're selling for all the time.

If you have put in a lot storage on the station then your prices are going to remain very high for a very long time as it takes your production modules ages to make enough to fill up the unused storage allocation and you will sell nothing.

The answer to that (aside from not building excess storage capacity in the first place) is to manually adjust the storage allocation slider for the ware downward. As you do so you can see the sell price adjust to reflect your change in real time, provided of course you have the sell price set to automatic. This way you can very easily and immediately tune the station to start selling it's products at the right price.

As I say, I would recommend you reset the whole station to default settings and then use just two settings tweaks from there:

1. Set a trade rule on buy order for any ware you do not want to the station manager to waste money buying in (such as ecells or ore) to my faction only and also change their buy prices to manual and set them to minimum to stop your own station traders going out and buying the stuff against your wishes.

2. Use the storage allocation slider to control your sell prices for end products but leave the prices on automatic. This is 100% effective. There is a bit of an art to setting the storage allocation optimally and you have to experiment from station to station to get the right amount so that the sell price is usually right and stays stable.

[insolent1]

Is it all your station traders?
If so it could be a trade rule, try unchecking the box about using station settings and switch it to "no restrictions" on all the stuff you want to sell.

[Finn]

Originally posted by Gregorovitch:

I think you problem here is that both the hull parts and the plasma converters you screenshotted are are set to manual sell amount of 1. In other words you've instructed your station ships sell only one of them.

Actually the station manager will sell the product as long as it is ABOVE the given number. It says so in the tooltip.