Patch basis: 9.0. Written 2026-08-16. This page contains no patch-specific values. It is a procedure, and procedures do not go stale the way stat tables do.
A ship that does nothing is the worst bug report in the world, including when you are the one filing it against yourself. There is no error message. The ship is fuelled, crewed and sitting in exactly the right sector, and it will sit there for four hours of game time while you reassign it in increasingly annoyed circles.
The reason guessing fails here is that half a dozen unrelated settings produce the same symptom. Salvage tugs that never tow, auxiliary ships that quietly ship your fleet’s supplies off to a trade station, miners that idle next to a full field — different causes, identical appearance from the map view.
X4 tug not collecting salvage, at a glance
| Situation | Diagnosis | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Just noticed the tug is idle, nothing checked yet | 0 of 8 checks confirmed — not enough to name a cause yet. | Check the standing behaviour first — it is the highest-ranked item. |
| Behaviour, subordination, wares and cargo all confirmed fine, but nothing tows | Nothing eligible in range: unclaimed or already-claimed wrecks are not work. | Claim the wrecks yourself first, then widen the tug’s assigned area. |
| Every check on the list confirmed yes and it still idles | Every check passes, so this is not a configuration problem. | Re-issue the behaviour once to force a re-evaluation before calling it a bug. |
These are outputs of this site's checklist tracker, not a claim about what a patch changed — every check is something you verify in your own save. Use the tracker below to confirm the checks yourself.
Confirm, then accuse
The tracker below is deliberately pedantic. It will not tell you what is wrong until you have actually looked. Every check you leave unconfirmed keeps the diagnosis open, because a plausible cause you never verified is how people end up rebuilding a working fleet.
Idle ship triage: confirm, then accuse
0 of 8 checks confirmed
0 of 8 checks confirmed — not enough to name a cause yet.
Check this next: Does the ship have a default behaviour assigned, not just an order queue?
This checks configuration, not game data. Nothing here claims what a patch changed — every line is something you verify in your own save, and the tracker keeps your progress in the URL.
Your progress lives in the URL, so you can close the game, come back, and pick up where you stopped — or paste the link into a help thread and have people argue with the checks you have already ruled out instead of re-suggesting them.
The order matters
The checks are ranked, and the ranking is not arbitrary. It runs from things that make the ship do nothing at all down to things that make the ship do the wrong thing.
- Behaviour before assignment. A ship with no standing behaviour looks identical to a ship with a bad commander, but only one of them is fixable from the fleet screen.
- Ware permissions before cargo. People check the hold, see space, and move on — while the ware itself was never enabled on that specific ship. Fleet-level settings are not ship level settings.
- Destination before source. A collector with nowhere to put things frequently declines to start rather than filling up and stalling, which reads as “it ignores the wrecks”.
Where the advice inverts
Two ships in the same fleet, doing nothing, want opposite treatment.
| Symptom | Reassign the behaviour | Leave the behaviour alone |
|---|---|---|
| Ship idles with an empty order queue | Yes — there is nothing driving it | No — you will lose the diagnosis and learn nothing |
| Ship is busy but moving the wrong cargo | No — the behaviour is working; the ware list is wrong | Yes — fix permissions, not orders |
| Auxiliary ship is selling your fleet supplies | No: this is a permissions failure wearing an orders costume | Yes, and restrict its ware list first |
| Tug ignores wrecks you can plainly see | Only after confirming the wrecks are claimed | Claim first; the order is not the problem yet |
The first two rows contradict each other on purpose, and that is the whole difficulty of this class of bug: the fix for an idle ship is the thing that hides the cause of a misbehaving one.
When every check passes
That is a real result, not a failure of the tracker. If all the configuration is right, the problem is state rather than setup, and there are only two useful moves left: force one re-evaluation by reassigning the behaviour once, and if it still refuses, report it with the completed checklist attached. A report that says “these nine things are confirmed correct” is worth more than a hundred that say “my tug is broken”.
Where this comes from
- The checks: things you verify in your own save. We assert none of them as facts about the current patch, which is precisely why the page does not rot.
- The ranking is our judgement, based on how the symptoms overlap, and it stays labelled as judgement rather than measurement.
- We do not list menu paths. Interface locations move between patches, and a wrong path is worse than no path — the check names what to confirm, and your build shows you where.
Updated if a patch changes how standing behaviours start, which would reorder the checks.
Sources
- X4 Foundations Public Beta - Version: 9.00 Release notes — official Egosoft patch notes covering the 9.0 AI, subordinate command hierarchy, and mining/fleet behaviour changes this checklist’s ranking assumes.
- “tugs not delivering salvage” — X4: Foundations General Discussions — community thread (with a developer reply) confirming tugs stall when the scrap processor is at capacity, i.e. a destination-side failure rather than an order failure.
- “Station subordinates won’t trade” — X4: Foundations General Discussions — friction evidence that a missing station manager is a common, easily-missed cause of an idle-looking subordinate; used here only as evidence people hit this class of bug, not as a mechanics citation.
