Craters, Drilled Holes, Underground not rendering

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Keen Software House: QA Department

We have the same problem. Here is our formal description:

We've now re-started the game on a dedicated (hosted) server several times. We keep having the same error eat our world within a few days of each restart.

Description:

1) Things appear to be just fine. We get meteors. We dig holes for ore. Life is great.

2) We log in, and at some point the ground is smooth as a baby's skin. No meteor craters visible. However, if you go into one of our digs (or a big meteor hole) you pass through the ground and are then "interior" to the world.

• Passing through the world skin is impactful. You toss around a bit. You grunt like hitting a surface.
• Once inside, the world is transparent. You can see everything underground.
• It is not like the falling-through-the-planet glitch, in that you never fall. You just walk around inside the "actually" dug region (although with invisible walls) that is covered by illusionary replaced ground surface.
• Once the voxel illusion glitch happens, we can even watch meteors hit the surface and leave no mark, but the crater is still there, still passable, and places us beneath the surface.

3) Mods:

We have the Modular Encounters Collection installed and Paint Guns.

• In our first world we only had a portion of Modular Encounters.
• In our next world we had the entire Modular Encounters.
• In this world we stripped out the Ground Encounters because, we reasoned, it puts ships partially stuck into the planet then heals the ground around them. That seems suspicious. With it NOT installed, the error still occurred.

4) This is like a few other reported bugs, like the ghosting bug, but seems to be a different beast.

Troubleshooting:

1. We've swapped hosts, wondering if it was a memory issue.
2. We've stripped out Ground Encounters from Modular Encounters.
3. We've upgraded the server to best of everything.

Proof:

In this last voxel illusion glitch I took a whole ton of pictures. I can post a bunch of half-in-the-ground or looking-through-the-world screenshots if there is any way that would help diagnose or better understand the problem. The person above has provided some pictures.

Further Troubleshooting:

• Returned to 3am backup from prior day. World was back to fine. Holes were holes again.
• Interesting and possibly diagnostic (?): We note that when in our underground Cryochambers (on initial startup) we can see through the ground (as if the glitch has occurred). On the moment of exiting the Cryo we either have the ground show up, or not.
• This morning the glitch has re-occurred. So, between our logoff at midnight, and login at 7am, something ran and did a faulty voxel cleanup? What would run only when we are offline, and break the game for our next login? What routine does a voxel patch/check/management/repair/action automatically that might be causing this?
• Maybe diagnostic: On one world, any time we left our base (where the big bore/drill operations happened) and then returned, the "STREAMING" button would appear as we got closer. Then at 400m (almost exactly) the server would crash. We sent several crash reports.

Further evidence:

We found several reddit posts that replicate our concern, more or less:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceengineers/comments/ess451/bug_transparent_ground_from_inside_the_caves_ive/

https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceengineers/comments/gayqb1/terrain_has_renewed_but_collision_didnt/

https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceengineers/comments/gfu17a/terrain_problem_anyway_to_fix_this_tried_with_the/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

Early hypothesis:

We do a bunch of mining. We have lots of meteors. At some point several days into a new world we appear to hit a critical level of voxel damage that triggers some sort of reset or cleaning routine? We log out with the server just fine, the error never occurs with us on the server. We log back in to a broken server, with baby smooth skin - and the glitches described above.

Note: We have had this experience on 4 restarts now - so we've had it happen on Earthlike, Mars, Titan.

Still happening after the server optimization update.

Even if this isssue has not many votes, it is game breaking. Our dedicated group of 8 players had to stop playing the game because it happens over and over! Please see that this issue was reportet multiple times for month and years now:

https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers/pc/topic/craters-drilled-holes-underground-not-rendering

https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers/pc/topic/mined-voxels-will-appear-filled-in

https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers/pc/topic/voxel-terrain-meshinggeneration-issue-after-patches

https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers/pc/topic/voxel-terrain-meshinggeneration-issue-after-patches_1

https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers/pc/topic/mined-voxels-still-rendering-as-unmined

https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers/pc/topic/planet-lod-bug

And maybe more - You should know it.

I'm new to SPE with around 200 hours in on a private server. This has happened twice now for me. Resetting the voxel map fixes the issue till we hit a critical stage and it happens. The first time the Voxel map was around 125MB. This time it's at 134MB which whilst anecdotal is a pattern.

I have the same problem, still no response from the devs here?

I’m on Xbox on a Nitrado server and am running into the same problem. This is another of several bugs that have been brought up years ago… do they still work on this game?