Cargo ships, etc. respawn timer?

Do the random ships respawn at a random time?

I did had 1 ship flying through my world, but I didn't had the time to catch it, so my question is do they respawn?

Thanks,
Bláckfur

 

i think someone said it every 10 minutes or so but i havent really tested it.

 

Yes, they spawn quite frequently, there is 9 different ships that can spawn, if you use the cockpit they will become permanent and you can use them forever.

 

Hmm.... okay, so the timers are random, because I have been playing this map for 10 hours or something and I did not see them respawning.

 

Typically I've seen them spawning at regular intervals. I had one of the long mining ships, then two mining haulers, then a military escort, and finally I have it saved as I'm about to tackle a military transport.

So far it's been a game of "deconstruct front end of red ship" then a few minutes later, go fetch a ship as it careens towards me, then head back to red ship, repeat. Seems like it's never been random, but I think I'll try timing it.

 

It is random, and I would say that in my experience there is a cargo ship in the sky about half the time. Only once have I been on the way to tackle one cargo ship and seen another enter the world, putting two in space at once.

If you have the option enabled and are NOT seeing cargo ships spawning after an hour, you may be affected by a known bug. Apparently if you disable cargo ships in an existing save, and then later try to re-enable them, the flag in the savegame file does not actually get updated, so they never come back.

You can wait for the patch or change your savegame yourself if you're not seeing them spawn.

As far as the spawn RATE, the entry in the savegame file has some parameters for that (min/max time) so either we'll get a slider in the UI at some point or we can edit the savegame to make it suit our tastes.

 

Yeah, it seems to be random. In one world, I got two and then none. In another world, I've had them showing up every 10 minutes or so... and I've now got 3 solar sails, 2 military transports, 2 mining carriages, 2 mine layers (one damaged because I missed a booby trap), 1 mining transport and 1 mining hauler. Sometimes, another would show up as I'm returning with another. I've spent the first hour or so in this world just collecting ships and haven't taken the time to break anything down.

Would be great if the random timer could be limited by game difficulty - a realistic, x3, x10 setting, so that if you're playing it on realistic, they don't show up as often, but will show up more often on the other settings.

 

I did disabled the option yesterday and enabled later on again, that might be the problem.

 

How can I edit the save file to re-enable cargo ships them? I am not sure on how to edit my save file.

 

Thanks to plaYer2k for helping someone out in the BUG REPORT forum.
He said this:

'Alright try this ...

Go to your "options -> game" and disable "compress saved games"


Now load your game and save it again so that you got it uncompressed (works without the above step aswell i think when you use winrar/7zip to unpack them, but i didnt test it).

Go to your save folder (default: C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\SpaceEngineers\Saves\<MAGIC_NUMBER>\<SAVE_NAME> ) and open the SANDBOX_0_0_0_.sbs file.

There you should see a block of text like this quite at the top of your file
Code:

Code:

    <Events>
      <MyObjectBuilder_GlobalEventBase>
        <Name>Cargo ship</Name>
        <Description>Spawns a cargo ship once in a while</Description>
        <EventType>SpawnCargoShip</EventType>
        <MinActivationTime>780000</MinActivationTime>
        <MaxActivationTime>1020000</MaxActivationTime>
        <ActivationTimeMs>749688</ActivationTimeMs>
        <WriteToLog>true</WriteToLog>
        <Enabled>false</Enabled>
      </MyObjectBuilder_GlobalEventBase>
    </Events>

What i have seen is that your file still has <Enabled>false</Enabled> while my worlds i tested with immediately changing the options back and forth without waiting for any ship got that setting to true.

So change that line to <Enabled>true</Enabled> and see if that fixed it.

Edit:
Now it should look like
Code:

Code:

    <Events>
      <MyObjectBuilder_GlobalEventBase>
        <Name>Cargo ship</Name>
        <Description>Spawns a cargo ship once in a while</Description>
        <EventType>SpawnCargoShip</EventType>
        <MinActivationTime>780000</MinActivationTime>
        <MaxActivationTime>1020000</MaxActivationTime>
        <ActivationTimeMs>10000</ActivationTimeMs>
        <WriteToLog>true</WriteToLog>
        <Enabled>true</Enabled>
      </MyObjectBuilder_GlobalEventBase>
    </Events>

but with different ActivationTimeMs. If chainging the Enabled flag from false to true did not work, change the ActivationTimeMs value to a low one and see if that solves it.'

 

Hi,

it should not be random at all. Ships should spawn in about 8 - 10 minutes. If it is not so, it is a bug.

 

Does changing the min max and MS Activation time change how often they spawn or just how long they are active in your game before despawn?

 

How often they respawn.

 

ATM I only have line with "Activation time" with value that varies around 700000Ms.
And this can be changed like Bláckfur wrote.

But is there any other way to change it, or maybe some chance for adding such option in the world creation menu?

 

How do you get to keep the ships that come along :S

 

Find and sit in the cockpit that is in each of the ships.

 

I usually get them quite frequently. It seems like there is almost always one in my world, and if not there are only about 5 min intervals between them.

 

im fairly sure ships dont despawn, there reactors run out of fule which turns off the beacons, which makes it appear to despawn.

but there still in the file taking up memory.

i use this tool to remove alot of the ones i never collected that are floating away

https://forums.keenswh.com/post/custom-importereditor-tool-setoolbox-6638984

 

If you leave the cargoships alone they will despawn. When you do things like entering the cockpit however they will stay in the savegame.

 

They definitively despawn. They dont appear in the SE-Tool. So they are not in the file any longer and wont eat up our memory

And the ships have (if they have) 1 uranium in their reactor. That will last for some days to keep the beacon and the whole ship online. The ships dont fly with their own power, they just switched the dumpeners off ... they are just floating around.

Third, last but not least, there are some ships using solar-cells. They'll never despawn in ur theory. But they do.


Its like Drumpiedumpie said. If u enter the cockpit, the despawntimer is turned off and the ship wont despawn. Cuz now its "urs".

 

Sorry to necro an old post.
But I was curious if there is a way to make the cargo ships not despawn until they get to the edge of the world limit? I thought I heard one of the Developers mention that this was how it was in a recent twitch interview. Though infinite world could be in trouble if that were the case.
People were talking about above that once you use the cockpit it will no longer despawn, is this still true? Also do we know of other methods of keeping them from despawning?
It seems that when you are close to them they won't, but if you then die an respawn far enough away from them they can instantly despawn it seems if their time is up? If this is the case, has anyone determined that distance?

 

Hacking anything the NPC player owns is enough to prevent the ship despawning.
Merge blocking your own ship to it would also work.

The Cargos ships start with 3 values, start point, end point, and a despawn timer. If the ship reaches the end point or the despawn time it vanishes. However if the player owns a single block on the ship it cannot despawn.

 

Thanks for the info, that will be very useful. Do you know if we have access to modify those values to make them stick around longer? or do those parameters just get created in the sandbox file when they get spawned in?

 

I'd also like to know where this despawn timer can be found. I've searched online and looked in the GlobalEvents.sbc file. All I saw were 3 entries:

MinActivationTimems
MaxActivationTimems
FirstActivationTimems

Sometimes the ships despawn before I can get to them, in some cases even when I set out immediately to reach them. Starting distance is usually about 10km away. Other times they just hang around awhile even when I'm nowhere near them.