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Surface boulders cannot be drilled with ship drills

Engi shared this bug 4 years ago
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I started a single player solar system game today on the earth-like planet. I can hand drill surface boulders and get stone and ores from them. However, when I build a large grid piston and drill block and tried to drill into the surface boulder. The drill/piston stops at the surface of the boulder and will not drill the boulder. It will drill the stone on the surface around the boulder but not the boulder itself.

I tried saving and reloading. That did not fix the issue.

This is a bug that has been a bug before, fixed and now it is back.

50 I have the same bug

Replies (16)

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Kateřina Červená ● 4 years ago

Hello, Engineer!


Thank you for your feedback! Your topic has been added between considered issues.

Please keep voting for the issue as it will help us to identify the most serious bugs.


We really appreciate your patience.


Kind Regards

Keen Software House: QA Department

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Alex L ● 4 years ago

Same happening here. I have a small grid mining ship with two drills. One is able to drill the rock and the other is not. They're both empty so this isn't an inventory issue. This is not a mod issue.

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ethzero ● 4 years ago

+1

Large drill on wheeled vehicle; fresh game as of 2020-07-26.

(Workaround: Insert drill tip on the boulder, use the manual drill to break-up and drill to hose-up the debris :) )

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Wesley Netcher ● 4 years ago

Same here. Did some experimenting and the boulder could NOT be removed by creative tool voxel hands. I tried to level the boulder out of existance and the voxel hands could not remove the stone or the iron inside the boulder. it removed all the earth grassland around the boulder.

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Ryan Martin ● 4 years ago

Same problem here, single drill mounted on an improved respawn pod. I can drill into the planet surface just fine, but it won't do anything to boulders. Hand drill drills boulders without apparent issue. New survival world generated 8/1 on 1.195 Deluxe. Experimental mode off.

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FlashBacker ● 4 years ago

Still getting this issue as of 1.196. Except now some boulders CAN be mined and others Can't then can, then cant again.

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Revale ● 4 years ago

Same here, Ive been playing around with SE toolbox to try and find a way to remove boulders altogether but am having difficulty even finding out how to do that. This is a game breaking issue for me

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Brian Collins, Jr ● 4 years ago

Same issue - one of my two drills can drill the boulder, the other cannot. I've removed and rebuilt the drill, copy/pasted the ship, et al - no change.


C'mon Keen - this is making the game nigh-unplayable in Single Player Survival at this point...

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Kham ● 4 years ago

Just ran in to this myself. Can drill the boulder by hand but my vehicle's drill, which I had already used to mine some of these boulders yesterday, isn't working on them any more... Really kills survival when you can't mine the damned ores.

Edit: After three reloads, the last time I fully exited the game, my rover drill is able to mine the boulder again...

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CloudyMN1979 ● 4 years ago

Has anyone found a work around? I've lost enough time in this game building things I can't use because of bugs.

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Kateřina Červená ● 4 years ago

Hello, Engineers!


Thank you for your reports. Unfortunately I wasn't able to reproduce your issue, stones and ores were mined by shop drills. Could you please provide us with a save of your world where you are experiencing this issue?

Thank you!


Kind Regards

Keen Software House: QA Department

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CloudyMN1979 ● 4 years ago

For me it was on mars on a dedicated server. The drills where attached to hinges on a wheeled vehicle. I'm also having the peculiar glitch where the LOD models for boulders show as boulders that have already been mined. Server is running at the time of this comment at 38.128.66.12:29165. I've attached a copy of the save.

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1stGenGamer ● 4 years ago

I am on NA #4 server and having the same problem. Can not use a ship drill on surface rocks. I have done everything including grinding down the drill and rebuilding it. The server has started several times to now avail. Everything worked fine for the first few hours then the problem with the ship drill started.

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Kateřina Červená ● 4 years ago

Hello!


Could you please provide me with the blueprints of your ship?

CloudyMN1979 Unfortunately there is no save attached, could you please upload it on Google Drive and share a google drive link?


Thank you!


Kind Regards

Keen Software House: QA Department

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Aaron Overton ● 4 years ago

I think the issue is going to be related to how the game renders the boulders, not the ship or drill being used. I hit this bug, on the Mars planet. In my case, all the boulders containing iron became immune to ship drills. At the same time, they are also rendered as deformed by earlier drilling activity. That is, I had partially drilled out one of them, left, came back later, and the ship drill would not work. Driving to other boulders, including some I'd never touched before, and they were now shaped as if they had been partially drilled out exactly the same way as the first and ship drills didn't work on those, either.

What if there's something in the code that is inadvertently rendering boulders referencing a specific instance of a boulder instead of creating a separate render? (That is, an object variable modified or accessed by reference versus value?) If the rendering part has borrowed from a specific boulder instance elsewhere, it could be displayed visually and still work in interacting with collisions of meshes, but when trying to apply an affect like "drill in range" could be looking at the spatial location of the original that is far away.

That's a total guess, but it would fit the results we are seeing, plus accessing object variables by reference is a super common bug that even veteran programmers get caught with from time to time. It might not explain why ship drills don't work but hand drills do, but I'd bet that location tracking for the player object is handled differently than everything else in the game, so could be the exception.

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3nemesis3 ● 4 years ago

Identical issue, and exactly as Aaron describes.

- Boulder was partly mined previously via small ship drill

- Left the area

- Return to find the small ship drill can no longer mine through the boulder

- Hand tools work

- Reloading only sometimes fixes the issue temporarily


Please fix this ASAP

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Wesley Netcher ● 4 years ago

Which file would you like. In the save there are several and I'm not sure which one you need to test this.

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Kateřina Červená ● 4 years ago

Hello!


The save of your world where the bug occurs: you can save your world with some easily recognizable name, then go to the folder with saves, zip that specific world and attach it here.

In case you will have difficulty attaching files you can optionally use Google Drive. When sharing a google drive link please make sure it is set to be downloadable by anyone with the link.


Thank you!


Kind Regards

Keen Software House: QA Department

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Merii ● 4 years ago

You're going to have trouble reproducing it, because reloading the world fixes it temporarily. It's random when it triggers, but you can trigger it by making a new vanilla world, finding a boulder, trying to drill it with a ship drill (e.g. atmo miner). If it works, reload the world and try again until it doesn't.

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Mark Sadler ● 4 years ago

I have this same problem. I made a video of the problem and took a snapshot of the drills working correctly. After a few hours of investigating I found the following (please, see below). Restarting the game at a save sometimes fixes the problem.

Right side drill does not damage the fleshy colored above-ground "mineral blisters" but it does damage the more grey colored "mineral blisters." It also damages the ground material next to both blisters. Video link (1:03 minutes) I posted to YouTube: https://youtu.be/cusguWDw6UM

This occurs on an offline private game with sneaky tools mod on and off (meaning plain vanilla game. I have also had this with and without the SciFi decorative mod.

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Merii ● 4 years ago

Please find attached a save where this issue is persistently present. This is a brand new earth easy start save.


To repro the bug:

  1. Go to hotbar 3 in the included truck (You will start in it)
  2. Turn on the drills group by pressing 1.

Expected result: The planet and boulder both start to take voxel damage.

Actual result: The boulder doesn't take damage, but the ground does.

Keep in mind, loading the save may temporarily fix the bug! Try doing stuff like turning the handbrake on/off, driving around a little, maybe try drilling the hillside a little bit, then go back to the boulder and try to drill it if it works.

Also if you can drill the boulder, try drilling it a little, save, exit, come back, see if it's still possible to drill it.

Files: surface-boulders-cannot-be-drilled-with-ship-drill...
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Gabriel M. ● 4 years ago

I am also having this problem in the game. I just bought the game this past week, so I'm just getting used to it, but I found it jarring that I wasn't able to drill boulders on the planet surface with my small miner. Like others have said in this report, sometimes reloading the save is enough to fix the problem temporarily. I did find a boulder I could not fix by reloading the save (or the game, for that matter). The save is linked here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1auTtEh3IR1GVUG_C1Jl5HuwWE8z9bUOL/view?usp=sharing (I tried attaching it here, but it said the maximum upload size was 2MB, and the compressed size was 4MB).


I started this save on Mars on survival, and I have two small ships with drills on them. Right now, the save should place you right in front of a boulder I can't mine. Seemingly I can mine the area around the boulder though. Let me know if you need any more information, or anything else about my system setup. I don't have any mods, and I've only had the game installed for a week (installed it during the Steam free midweek period last week, then decided to purchase it).

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Gabriel M. ● 4 years ago

Sorry, I just realized I forgot to open up the permissions on the file. It should be downloadable now. Let me know if there are any issues, or any more questions.

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Richard Brown ● 4 years ago

I have experienced this as well, It appears to have been reported many times and in this thread is being treated as reproduced and awaiting fix https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers/pc/topic/unable-to-mine-boulders-with-ship-or-rover-drills. Since this thread appears to have more votes could this be marked as "Reproduced and awaiting fix" so that it could be of a higher priority?

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Kateřina Červená ● 3 years ago

Hello, Engineers,


This issue has been successfully reproduced in this topic: https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers/pc/topic/unable-to-mine-boulders-with-ship-or-rover-drills and it's awaiting fix.


I'm merging these topics together. Thank you for your patience.


Kind Regards

Keen Software House: QA Department

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