Work on 8.0 but from what I see distances don't matter to traders. I have my purchase and sale set to 5, and they still often fly further. The rest seems to work. I use only DeadTrader

Yes @SkyFall

Guys, does it still work on 8.0? Has anyone checked?

Yes @Hebrux

If I use a trader to mimic a large freighter that has the deathtater or tater trade behavior, will my subordinates follow the same behavior?

I have the following problem.
I use DeadTrader for my traders. I have a station from which my traders (40 trader ships) sell goods to other NPC stations. When I have SINZA activated, almost no trade offers are found. I have observed this for several minutes.

When I turn SINZA off, it takes less than 5 seconds for the traders to find trade offers and start loading my goods to deliver them to the other station.
I repeated this several times and always came to the same result.

Has anyone experienced the same problem?

"20250923 I have decided to completely retire from X4 Modding. I have added licenses to Eco, Scripts, and DeadTater if any persons are interested in using, modifying, or continuing my works. Thank you for all the support and interest in my work over these years."

-DeadAir via github

UPDATE WHEN?????????????????

Going to respond to Vardic's message here: To the best of my knowledge Deadtater is the enhanced version of Tatertrade. It does appear to be broken to me as well, so keep it to Deadtater exclusively.

This mod appears to be everything that I've wanted with trading and more.

At first I thought that this wasn't going to work for me because I couldn't assign traders to stations to deadtater trade - I thought that this would be a problem because of max trade distance. But when I assigned a one-star captain to deadtater trading with an anchor sector with no stations of my own he has a max trade range of 3 sectors.

How exactly is max trade range being calculated here?

Has anyone else seen issues with Tatertrade since 8.0? I'm running into issues where ships won't trade. They just sit idle for no reason that I can understand. As an example setup, trade home set to Argon prime, max buy/sell gate distance, and all legal wares. I'll come back 30 minutes later and they are just sitting there, but if I switch to Dead tater same setup anchor space Argon Prime, max buy/sell distance, auto wares, The freighter is off trading in just a few minutes. I didn't have these problems before 8.0 and I can't think of anything I've changed other mod wise, so I'm at a bit of a loss. Thought I'd ask and see if anyone else has had issues.

I think boron is missing from list of factions to avoid trading with

@Reithan
Ahh, I hadn't thought of that. Being able to have fleets do specific region based trading by limiting the jump range etc.
I just wondered if there was some AI behaviour/functionality in regards to having multiple fleets.
But I think thats just me getting mixed up with something I no doubt read somewhere else.
TY bud :)

@Reclaimer 117 asfar as I know, the benefit of multiple fleets would be to be able to set a different anchor location for each one.

Hey, I was just wondering if you could clarify something for me?
Is there any point/difference to having multiple trader fleets?
If I understand correctly, it would be better for performance to just have one single trading fleet, so theres only one commander running the script.
I currently have a single massive fleet of M-class traders and each ship gets assigned different trade tasks, so I'm wondering if theres any point/difference/benefit to having multiple trade fleets?

NVM, I went so heavy on the blacklist exclusions that I also excluded the free families territories. Made the freighter go through a matrix sector because there was literally no other way lol

I appreciate you trying to explain it to me, but I still don't really get it. I was kinda hoping more for something along the lines of "If Johnny has 100 apples in his freighter, and he makes ten jumps..." lol
No worries though, I've just left it at the default setting. That seems to work fine.

Oh, I do have another question though. Have you run into any problems with this mod respecting blacklists? I've got a problem where I'm trying to stop a freighter passing through one of the matrix sectors, and it just keeps heading through it every time.
I think I've set up the blacklists properly. I made one for activity, travel, and trade, gave them all the same hostile factions and the same dangerous sectors, ticked the "civilian" box, and then set the fleet commander to use those three blacklists, with the rest of fleet set to "use commanders settings."
Is there something I'm doing wrong? The game is so complex, I keep thinking I must have missed something or done something wrong.

@Mr_Anivex - a small diff of parameters.xml will make the failed orders not annoying but I've also never seen the behavior your mentioned (maybe due to other changes, not sure)
<replace sel="/parameters/orders/failures/@queuemax">0</replace>

@Reithan - it would require making some changes to order.trade.routine but I'm no longer modding x4.

@Reclaimer 117 - Projected profit * (1.0 - %Penalty_Per_Jump / 100.0) ^ Gate_Distance
Gate distance is amount of jumps between the ship and the station to buy at PLUS the amount of jumps between the station to buy at and the station to sell at.

Ok, so I'm feeling rather dumb... Can someone explain the distance penalty to me?...
Preferably using in game trade examples. I can't wrap my head around it.

As far as I can tell station managers use the default auto-trade logic. Would it be possible to add some way to swap these to use DeadTater?

Would it be possible to add a function to clear failed orders? Perhaps one that runs on an adjustable timer?

Whenever I load into a game, if the commander of my trade fleet was mid-trade(as in, already picked up the materials and is on the way to sell), any ships in that fleet will get an order queued up to mimic the commander's sell order. It doesn't really interrupt too much as far as I can tell, as the order simply fails and they go back to deadtater once the commander completes the order they had queued up. However, this ends up stacking and I end up with a ton of traders with 5 failed orders each.

This is more of request for the sake of keeping things looking clean. All the orange icons just look like a mess to me, and it makes it difficult to tell when something is actually broken with my orders for fleets not using deadtater.

Love the mod btw. You solved many of my trade issues, and saved me so much time.

Adding money to the station budgets has solved it. Sorry for not seeing that earlier.

When I set a station trade rule to only trade with my faction at a factory, my dead tater fleet will completely ignore that factory.

Hi DeadAirRT. I love your mods! I have a feature request for Deadtater: It would be nice if I could assign an Auxiliary ship to supply my Deadtater fleet and have ships that take damage automatically repair themselves when damaged after their current trades are finished.

@Kater - I have never once seen that in all my testing, or received any reports of it. You most likely have something messing with your trade offers (a different mod) or there is some information missing in your description of the problem.

If you have queue spreading turned on, there is no way for multiple ships to get the same trade at the same time. If you are using SETA or something then that would cause issues because this game can barely run smoothly at 1x speed with all the objects in the galaxy, let alone 4-6x

Thanks DeadAir for maintaining this mod, I paused the game few years ago and to find this is still updated is somewhat soothing. Thanks also for all your scripts, pretty convenient.

Thats the thing, i use exactly that. And even if i cancel the trade, sometimes they come back. But since its a general mod problem, or at least seems to be, i would almost assume its a "this is a mod" problem. Sometimes ships keep coming for minutes, even if all resources are already here. Canceled ships sometimes even just keep re-reserving the trade etc. Its weird. I would love to look deepter into that...but i lack the technical knowledge :/

@Kater - Yes, use deadtater with the queue spreading. Can't do anything about the engine not updating the trade offer when multiple traders find the exact same trade other than not allowing multiple to process at the same time.

Is there any way to make the mod "respect" trade reservations? What happened is...as per usual, i forgot a module for one of the station building missions. I added it and within a few seconds, 4 Frogs running on dead tater (1 fleet, 100 Frogs for testing) announced and reserved a delivery. all 4 combined, perfect amount. Just when i wanted to close the menu, 6 further frogs reserved the full amount of claytronics needed each. So far, i have only seen this happen for construction sites and with various trade mods (in different savegames). Can this be fixed/changed/influenced somehow? Maybe for completions sake, its not a new problem, this goes back, as far as i can remember, to the day tatertrade was first released. Same happens with Random Trade, Random Supply and even more often and more severe with the mules and warehouses mod (none of which are or ever where active in the current savegame).

@no fun
Yes. I use it in 7.60.

This still work with the latest update?

Love your mods.
Appreciation comment.

@x-act - it means you have the settings making them not find anything.

No matter which setting I use, I always get the following message: 'Failed to find a trade "x" times...' Does someone have a solution?

lol - can't even find the config screen... help!

@Grimmsdottir - limited to shorter range based on their own skills

@fadamor - if you are able to give the station it's budget then dead tater is your best option. If you aren't, then vanilla station trader since it sometimes can work without proper buy orders.

Hi DeadAirRT, I would like to ask a simple question regarding your deadtater script and the vanilla mimic fleet commander behaviour.
If I have a high star captain as the commander, who can buy/sell in up to 10+ sectors away, and I buy some new ships with newbie captains, will they share the same range as the commander, or will they be limited to their own smaller ranges?

DeadAirRT I have two questions regarding the use of Dead Tater:
First, is there a document somewhere explaining the settings?
Second, Given Vanilla Trading, Tater Trader, and Dead Tater, which setup would be the best for commanding freighters to supply a station for food and medical? I'm finding in Dead Tater that the freighters are claiming none are found even if # of jumps to buy is set to 15.

If you set the trade rule for a ware to only buy from your faction, both tater/deadtater apply the trade rule to both sides. This shouldn't be the case for what your are seeing when you manually order them to trade but steam comments aren't exactly a good place to try and figure out your issue.

The most common things that people mess up are:
Budget (due to the way trade offers are implemented)
Trade restriction blacklist/whitelist inverse
Trade rule handling
Pricing
Buy up to/Sell up to problems

The station that needs to buy Energy Cells has a full budget that exceeds 200% of the maximum value the traders can sell to it. It's not just station traders either, and even if I manually order a trader to load up on Energy Cells they will still wait until they find an NPC station buying them at the maximum price.

@deceiver9811 - if your station doesn't have money in it's budget, it doesn't generate trade offers. if it only has partial budget, it only generates partial orders.

Noticing a weird problem where my traders refuse to sell to my own stations. Not sure if it's a conflict with the SW Interworlds mod replacing the existing factions (and thus somehow causing problems with "Only buy from my faction" trade rules), or if I'm doing something wrong.

@probe1 - use trade restrictions (it's a type of blacklist) in global orders

Boron don't appear in the list of trade bans.

@Merluca - I agree, I'm just grateful for DeadAirRT making this Mod. Thanks!

@DeadAirRT - Oh Dont worry, its not a bother, im quite happy with how the Mod works and enjoy it a lot,
If you fix it or not, of if its even possible cause of Egosoft Magic sorcery, its something you decide.
So, whatever you decide to do, you have my thanks.

@DirtDiver_ZA, Merluca - So the stations are in fact known because you have the trade subscription, and the pathing is handled by egosoft scripts. This previously worked without issue but once again egosoft did something with a patch (7.5) that I may or may not bother to fix for them again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Part 2:
Ok After i flew a ship myself into the sector to open up the route, they started to fly again, even if i didnt find the Station, so the Problem seems to be the path into the unkown sector.

Hello, I just stumbled into the same Problem, Only using the trader mod, after Buying a trade Subscription and the Trader trying to fly for a Station in a unknown sector, they just freeze.

Hi,

Yes I do have the trade license. Would that be the reason why the station is known to the traders?
Otherwise its not a big issue. I just need to explore more :)