Cargo space is broken

[Airpower]

While doing some research on cargo space, I ran into a bug. At least I think it's a bug. I seriously hope this is a bug, and not an intentional design decision...

Based on my numbers, I have found that ships (I haven't tested freighters and mining ships) and space stations of all stripes, and in all situations, are hard capped at stockpiling about 30000 units of each resource they are extracting. It doesn't matter if the space station is a mining base, a gas mining base, or a star base. It doesn't matter if the ship is a Resupply ship or a regular combat ship with extractors and cargo space. It doesn't matter if the unit is extracting, 1, 2, 3, or 4 resources from the planet. It doesn't matter if the unit has a commerce center or not. It doesn't matter if it has additional resource extractors. It doesn't matter if the unit has 500,000 units of cargo space. Once the extracting unit hits 30000, it stop adding to its stores. Below is the data I gathered to support this claim.

When viewing these numbers, please note that a station's actual storage value for gas is somewhere in the neighborhood of 3x the designed cargo storage amount (not exactly, but ballparkish - this is actually the main thrust of my research).

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Krypton Gas (Gas)
 Storage         Observed maximum stockpile
 548000		30155
 400000		30124
 300000		30189
 200000		30117
 100000		30109
 50000		30108
 35000		30133
 34000		30143
 33000		30133
 32000		30178
 31000		30231
 30000		30147
 29000		30165
 28000		30124
 27000		30185
 26000		30194
 25000		30140
 24000		30160
 23000		30132
 22000		30124
 21000		30151
 20000		30131

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 19000		30163
 18000		30115
 17000		30166
 16000		30182
 15000		30127
 14000		30187
 13000		30135
 12000		30122
 11000		30167
 10000		30154
 9000		30124
 8000		30134
 7000		26499 (This is the first tested value that doesn't hit the cap)
 6000		22533
 5000		18896
 4000		14488
 3000		10461
 2000		7260
 1000		3235

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Argon Gas (Gas)
 Storage         Observed maximum stockpile
 10000		30192
 9000		30292
 8000		30139
 7000		26927 (This is the first tested value that doesn't hit the cap)
 6000		22975
 5000		19279
 4000		15297
 3000		11280
 2000		7247
 1000		3235
 
 Dilithium Crystal (Mineral)
 Storage         Observed maximum stockpile
 60000		30036
 40000		30105 (Confirmed cap)
 
 Loros Fruit (Luxury)
 Storage         Observed maximum stockpile
 60000		30066
 40000		30035 (Confirmed cap)

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Mixed Gas (Argon, Helium, Krypton, Tyderios)
 Storage         Observed maximum stockpile
 60000		30136 Argon, Helium, Krypton, and Tyderios each (confirmed cap)
 
 Mixed Fuel Gas (Caslon, Hydrogen)
 Storage         Observed maximum stockpile
 60000		30139 (confirmed cap)
 
 Resupply ship and/or combat ship with gas extractors & cargo space
 Storage         Observed maximum stockpile
 100000		30109 Hydrogen, Caslon each (confirmed cap)

I have to assume this is a bug. I have not seen any mention of a 30000 resource hard cap in game anywhere, and it sure as hell makes no sense logically.

One immediate outcome from this knowledge is that refueling a fleet with total fuel reserves of over 30000 fuel is not possible with one refueling pass. Ships will fly away with less than full tanks, sometimes with having gained no fuel at all. This has tremendous implications to large-scale fleet refueling operations. Barring the possibility of refueling at a well-stocked planet (I haven't tested this yet), there is no way to refuel a fleet with more than 30000 total fuel in one refueling pass.

This seriously needs to be addressed, or at least explained.

[Airpower]

Did everyone already know that cargo was capped at 30100? Was I the only one out of the loop here? [&:]

[Ceorl]

I didn't know about it, but I'm not sure what to add to your analysis. Its a problem, the developers should be made aware of it. My guess is that a coder programmed the cap into the system not out of evil intentions but simply in order to finish that particularly code section more quickly.

[Airpower]

I hope you're right. In any case, I'm not saying there were bad intentions. I'm just unclear if this is working as intended or not. If this is intentional, it needs to be represented in the ship design screen.

As evidence that this is a bug, when a station that is mining gas hits this cap, it continues to display the gas mining animation. Meaning little gas poofs shoot out of it. I tested with gas, luxury, and mineral sources, and even though mining appears to be continuing, the empire's strategic reserve does not increase past the 30100 resource cap of the base.

Meaning if you have 1 Argon station and an empire stockpile of 0 Argon, when the base hits its 30100 unit cap, you will have an empire stockpile of 30.1k Argon. But even though the base visually appears to be mining after this point, the total empire amount won't increase. After 30 minutes, the base will still visually appear to be mining, but your empire stockpile of Argon will remain at 30.1k.

This behavior is very odd, and in my opinion, indicative of a bug.

[elvendeathknight]

Maybe you should post this in the bug section.

Thanks for your analysis !

[Airpower]

Thanks! Hope it's useful to you.

Two reasons - first, I want actual players to see it and be aware that this cap exists.

Second, I'm not sure it's a bug. I'm hoping to get developer feedback to clarify this point.

[Rhikore]

Thanks Air, nother solid find.

Wish I had the heart/time to do more...

[Airpower]

Sorry to bump this, but I was curious if any community veterans had any thoughts on this issue.

Is this cargo space limitation in place intentionally? Has this already been detected and discussed before? Should I report this as a bug? Or is this a known "feature"?

[Tormodino]

I had no idea this was the case. I am frequently overwhelmed by the amount of stuff going on in DW

I think you should report it as a possible issue. I'm not really a veteran, but I have played the game on and off since it came out and it would be very interesting and useful to find out more about this.

[feelotraveller]

Sorry, been offline and pretty busy.

Yes good find. Funnily enough I had sort of noticed it but not really paid it too much attention in my real game(s).

It is new to Universe as previously in Shadows and before mining stations would exhaust their excess once they reached whatever their cargo capacity was and at that point try to equalise their resources.

I pretty sure it is deliberate (but unnoted) [:@] on the part of the developers. One thing it stops is having the megamining fortress with almost unlimited storage, and more generally it is probably to encourage players to go 'wide' rather than 'tall'. And, that, I fully support. [8D]

[Nanaki]

If colonies and stations are consistantly sitting on maximum resources, it makes you wonder if the issue is not the cargo space problem, but rather there are too many resources floating around. One consequence I can see of removing the resource 'limit' is ship/base prices plummeting due to resource availability.

Most of the time I see resource shortages, the issue is not resource shortages but excess product from mining stations not getting transported to starports. It seems like the private sector/smugglers tend to emphasise international trade over intranational trade, which results in lots of trade income but starports commonly running out of resources.

To test this, I created a custom planet with nothing but Loros Fruit and Zentabia Fluid, and threw a couple of moons around it with 100% of all of the strategic resources, steel, silicon, gold, lead, etc. Despite virtually limitless quantities of resources being literally a stones throw away, the planet and its starport (a large one) still commonly ran out of resources, especially after large production orders. I also noticed that many strategic resources were often understocked as well.

[mxmissile]

Disclaimer: this is just a fly by theory

could have something to do with possibly cargo space being stored/calced as an Int16 value, so the cap would be 32767 (0x7FFF) maybe the algorithm is set to keep it below that #?

[Airpower]

That's really smart, mxmissile. Good theory!

The reason I'm prone to believe this is a bug as well is that Resupply ships REQUIRE 20% of their size to be cargo holds (and gas extractors). Leading us to believe the larger cargo holds would be needed to hold a lot of gas.

But these ships are capped at 30100 per resource too. Meaning the max cargo space they would need -ever- is 60200. This would require 488 space, with the largest cargo hold. On a size 4500 ship, you would need to allocate 900 space worth of cargo. This means 412 space worth of wasted cargo bays, or 52 bays that will never be used.

[Strat_84]

Either this somewhat "fixed" cargo space in mines affects the availability of ressources, or the bug might be deeper than that.

There's a new game I started with patch 1.9.5.5, start in the age of Shadows, after 50 years of game I haven't noticed any price increase for any strategic ressource. Not even the one I usually notice for Silicon in the beginning.