Entire base lost stability for no reason, hours of effort lost?

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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Hi all, I just experienced a brain melting bug on one of the offical pvp servers in Conan, and right after I purchased the Argosian DLC to do the “fancy” upper level as well. I’m at a bit of a loss as to how this happened.

I had built a ceiling-hung base into one of the jungle temples, with staggered pillars at different heights initially rising from the ground up. I built the ceiling at a high level - 4 stacks in total, and then set up my hatch frames and a couple of other things like lights and crafting benches. Now keep in mind that I did one crucial thing before removing the bottom pillars:

I built the whole first floor out of sandstone, and removed the pillars beneath the floor.

Everything was fine.

So, with all of my floors built I began knocking out the pillars from the very bottom of the base, again it’s important to note that these pillars were not attached to anything other than the ground, they were not supporting my upper level base.

Well, removing most of the pillars was fine, until I got to one particular pillar which, upon removal, demolished my entire base. Everything lost stability, even the other ceiling hung pillars!

That is completely inexplicable to me, they all had stability at 100, and most of my ceiling pieces were at 80, they were definitely getting support from more than just that one pillar, the base was 9x9 squares in area!

I also built this exact same base in single player mode just as a test, and nothing at all went from with it.

Even stranger, looking at my logs the number of pieces that lost stability was very small, the other structures seem completely unaccounted for. Also, the foundations I had beneath my vault have vanished - these were perfectly good foundations anchored in solid ground which I had been around for over an hour. The vault, mercifully, remains intact, with 168 hours of decay left on it.

So now I’m several days of evening farming in the hole, plus materials my friends had given me, plus I purchased the Argosian DLC seemingly for no reason as I honestly don’t have the will to play this anymore.

How could my entire base have simply demolished itself? Is there any way I can get my materials back?

To give an idea of the scale of this meltdown, I lost approximately:

400 ceiling tiles (9x9 grid at 5 stacks with hole)
4 hatch frames
12 walls (4 for the hatches, 4 for an underhang, 4 on top of the top floor)
120 pillars (pillars ran in a box with edge 7x7 5 units down from the ceiling)

tl:dr; Removing one hanging pillar that was not supporting anything caused my base to dismantle itself, most pieces were not accounted for in the logs, including foundations that were connected to the ground.

RIP.

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Always sad when a crucial build piece goes in a base build :anguished:

When you mention “ceiling-hung base into one of the jungle temples”, did you mean a base that was down from a foundation in a tree and into a temple?

That you used pillars from the ground up to support various parts of the structure, and then once done, started removing the supporting gound-based pillars?

You don’t mention whether you tested all stability points each time you removed a pillar?

Stability is a fickle thing, especially with non Foundation pieces (I have found). What makes it more interesting is that build pieces, depending on what they are, have an area effect on the surrounding pieces so that removing one innocent piece de-stabilises a batch of other ones leading to a key part failing. It is irritating. I have lost entire complicated ceiling/roofing structures. I lost my ‘temple district’ to a Purge area effects knocking out the ‘wrong’ foundation.

In my opinion, I would try to always rely on foundations for core stability, and if I were suspending any builds (like that amazing award-winning xmas decoration build last year), I would keep them small.

Good luck! (and post images of base builds so others can get inspiration from you :slight_smile:

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I had an all argossean building with pillars encasing a maproom that had pieces lose stability every day as soon as I got close to it. Then when the latest patch hit, the whole building crumbled. All of it.

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So there was something else curious going on that I forgot to mention - the decay time on the base pieces was ticking down seemingly for no reason, and it was unreasonably low at only 59 minutes, no matter what I built. This included the foundations I initially put up on the ground.

It couldn’t have been a crucial stability piece I removed, as that pillar was not connected to the base, I had already severed the connection at the ground level and was removing vestigial sandstone pillars hanging from the ceiling. At that point the entire base was supported from the roof of the temple structure.

Further, not all sections of the base were ever connected to that pillar, there were other pillars holding up other parts of the base and everything I had built vanished in one go.

Is there any official way to contact the server admin and try and get my building pieces back? I honestly don’t have the will to continue playing if something like this can happen with no recourse, I have probably spent a week of collecting items for this project and everything I had tested up to this point showed that it was a perfectly valid structure.

This seems like a really big error in the way the game handles structures. My only thought is, that one pillar had become a “support island” despite not actually being connected to the ground, and the game does not properly recalculate all avenues for support for buildings when structural changes are made.

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I don’t think you’ll be able to get anything back but you might at least be able to get an explanation, depending on whether it’s a player run server or official.
My guess to why it happened would be that ceilings can’t provide stability.

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Official, while ceilings can’t provide support, pillars can, I had them circling the base and in the middle supporting it. Like I said in the post the pillar that appeared to trigger the collapse was not a support, the base and that pillar were already hanging. That is to say, the pillar I removed was dangling from a ceiling.

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I wish we could have seen a picture of what it looked like. That may have helped figure out what might have happened. I’ve been told from a number of people that pillars are fickle things. It’s like their stability can be calculated differently sometimes and then they run into problems.

Early on I lost my chest where I stored my precious iron that I gathered. It wasn’t all that much but it was a lot to me at the time. I had it stored on a floor piece in a corner supported by a pillar. Even though it was just that corner and it was walls and foundation for the rest of it, one morning server restart had everything on that one floor piece on each level lost stability.

That sucked. I was down thinking about how much time I spent on gathering that. You can either call it a day or get to replacing it. I chalked it up to a learning experience and got to replacing it. Conan Exiles is a survival game and losses and setbacks happen. Even more so on a pvp server, I would imagine! Get back in there.

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Thanks man, I totally sympathise with the chest loss :frowning:

I do have pictures of it actually, of the finished version I made in the singleplayer sandbox. I’ll add the pillar back on that I removed.

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One of the things to consider is that a 0% stability item may stay spawned while you are around it, but when you leave the area and then reenter, any 0% stability piece will be despawned.

The issue is when you are connecting non-foundational pieces, which normally progress downward in stability stepping 20% at a time, but, for some reason, bug or the jungle environment, I do not know, the step down is >20%. I have attached a fence to a 60% stable ceiling tile and had it report as 0% stability. It despawned when I left the area.

I suspect this may have happened to you.

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Hmm interesting, at first I thougt this might not apply to me but I do recall now that I DID leave that base to travel one cell over to my other base to pick up more items. At that point, the base was complete save for the final floor which I intended to place my now totalled fridge and fire on. I came back and then started knocking pieces out. But again, I did successfully knock out all the lowest level pillars. The pillar that triggered the collapse was not supporting anything, it was hanging from a tile. Perhaps though, destroying that pillar triggered a status update or something equivalent on all attached pieces, which would have propagated up at least one structure of ceiling tiles. However all five levels of ceiling were separate from each other, as they had their own supporting pillars three tiles apart, so while I was prepared to lose some part of my structure, losing the whole thing seems impossible, as the structure was not all connected.

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How does one get in touch (as best they can) with the game’s support? I see on the Funcom site they only point players to some FAQs and the forum for help for Conan, not to any ticket system or game specific email address. Do support personnel tend to reply to threads here? In case there is any doubt my event logs do show the sad, sad truth of the sudden stability loss of all my items, I should probably screencap that.

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The best thing to do is submit a Bug Report with as much data as possible. It will not get your structure back, but if it is a game issue, they will review.

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I too am having stability issues on both ends of the spectrum. Last week I had a barrack/mess hall totally collapse even though it was on a solid foundation. That was weird, but what happened the week before was even stranger.

I had a large sandstone structure by Sepermeru that I wanted to get rid of. The structure was on stilts supported by foundations. I didn’t want to spend the time to dismantle piece by piece so I removed all foundation pieces, the whole structure was still intact (20x9 with a 7x9 el). So I figured that the pillars must be supporting the structure, I removed every last pillar, the entire structure was suspended mid air. The whole thing came crumbling down when I removed an unsupported ceiling tile.

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Ok THIS must be what happemed to me, stability must be calculated strangely when pillars are involved. I’m building the components now for a new attempt - wholly made of sandstone, and I shall rebuild and then see what happens. Crucially I am going to make the pillars first and remove their lower supports before placing any ceiling tiles. I will also attempt to anchor the ceilings with foundations somehow. I am hoping that with the floor supports gone before placing ceilings, that those ceilings will gain support from the pillars above them instead of below, even though the game should be evaluating stability from all sources and not just from one.

My working theory for the base collapse is that the ceilings and pillars all gained support from below. Even though they were later anchored to the roof of the temple, when the lower support was removed something prevented the game from correctly recalculating their sources of stability. This may be due to my leaving my base, and some part of it becoming abandoned. I wasn’t gone for long, but I did move one grid square away. If decay was being miscalculated already which appeared to be the case, I may have lost some slice of the mid section of my floor containing crucial pillars.

As a game developer myself I have come across many scenarios when walking a tree of items that are related to each other where programming errors cause certain connections to be lost or never made in the first place. In those cases an attempt to find any item with property y (stability in this case) starting at item x (a ceiling, RIP) can fail.

I’ll take pics of the sandstone structure and how I construct it, plus anything weird that happens.

Assuming nobody breaks into it tonight!

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Good luck, hope your build is successful!

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Just a wee update: I rebuilt most of the base out of sandstone, beginning with the offset foundations at the bottom for the pillars. I then built the pillars up to the ceiling and topped them with a ceiling and foundation combo sunk into the rock. I immediately chopped the pillars off at the bottom, before doing any further work. I noticed a couple of floating pillars, but I do believe they had stability due to the collision mesh for the rock not exactly reflecting its appearance.

Something that struck me was that all of my constructions had the proper decay time of 168 hours, instead of 45 minutes like before. I was also able to swap pillars in-place once I upgraded thr first ceiling stack and its supports to t3. With my previous attempt, the pillars did not appear to be replaceable.

I’m convinced that something was broken with the server during my last attempt, I recall my elevators at a nearby base having 0 hp at the time as well, which has since been rectified.

All of my tests on knocking out pillars and floors were successful too, there were no strange behaviours.

Fingers crossed that the whole thing doesn’t collapse again. I shall be building my crafting stations on their own foundations though!

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