[OPEN] Bugged staff won't leave even after being fired

Description of problem
I've been playing the first main map (after the three tutorial maps) for a day or two now, and since the first 20 or so minutes of gameplay there has been a nurse stuck in one of the trauma bays. She won't do anything, just stands there in front of the stretcher doing nothing and not responding to anything. I've fired her, hired her, fired her again, transferred her to a different department, transferred her back, removed the surroundings, rebuilt the surroundings, you get the idea. She remains there. A little earlier today I noticed another nurse had joined her with this issue of immobility and unresponsiveness so I decided to report the issue as I've not found any fixes.

Character names

• Rachel Johnson
  
• Dana Garcia
  

Both characters are nurses in unmarked trauma bay across from trauma bay 2.

Game details
Latest as of date of posting (November 6, 2019). No mods.

Relevant screenshot(s)



I've attached a copy of the active save (named Meow.zip). Since the bug started quite early into playing this save, I haven't got an autosave without it. However, I do have one from before the second nurse joined in. Hopefully that will suffice for now.

I've also attached the output_log.txt too, though a brief look through that didn't mention either of the two nurses (did mention some other stuff that sounds worth investigation, such as many lines of "Steamworks: Failed to set stat STAT_MONEY_SPENT, 868360" and "Broken pointer to entity ID 1003001521").

Hopefully there's a good bit of info here for you guys to work on. I'm really liking the game so far.


At this point, I'd be tempted to rename those nurses to patients given that they haven't fulfilled needs in a long time. Perhaps a feature to add would be staff becoming patients if they don't/aren't given the opportunity to fulfil needs appropriately.

Hi, thanks for the super detailed report!

For now I'm attaching a fixed save with the two nurses unstuck. Unfortunately it seems that the issue is pretty rare and random, so it might take a while to track it down. I'll let you know if/when we have any news.

jan.oxymoron wrote:Hi, thanks for the super detailed report!

For now I'm attaching a fixed save with the two nurses unstuck. Unfortunately it seems that the issue is pretty rare and random, so it might take a while to track it down. I'll let you know if/when we have any news.

When people report bugs, I always have to ask for more details. It takes time that could've been spent fixing the bug had the initial reporter provided more information in the report, so I include everything relevant by default.

I'll download and work with the un-bugged save. Thanks for your time, and also thanks for your work on this game.


As a side-note: Is there a save editor that can be used? I notice that the save format is a zip-compressed pair of XML files and a preview image, but when I tried to manually remove these employees (on a copy of the save, for safe measure) the save refused to load after. Does the game employ a specific compression algorithm that must be used, or is there some other save verification system to prevent certain methods of cheating?

Xyrhenix wrote:
...
As a side-note: Is there a save editor that can be used? I notice that the save format is a zip-compressed pair of XML files and a preview image, but when I tried to manually remove these employees (on a copy of the save, for safe measure) the save refused to load after. Does the game employ a specific compression algorithm that must be used, or is there some other save verification system to prevent certain methods of cheating?

No, the data are actually human-readable/editable by design. In this case it's likely that a reference to the deleted characters in their department or elsewhere is causing the problem with load.
FYI - the hotfix on my side was basically changing the stuck characters from <m_nurseState>OverridenReservedForProcedure</m_nurseState> to <m_nurseState>Idle</m_nurseState>, just done from code, not in the XML directly. But it's worth noting that these changes aren't always safe, so we of course always try to get to and fix the root cause.

Xyrhenix wrote:Is there a save editor that can be used? I notice that the save format is a zip-compressed pair of XML files and a preview image, but when I tried to manually remove these employees (on a copy of the save, for safe measure) the save refused to load after.

You can load the XML directly in the game, no need to rezip, it will show in the savegames where you can resave it with a different name to remake the archive if you want. For edititng Notepad++ is highly recommended.