Disappearing traits — Ways to maintain sanity in the era of layout doom.

Method #0: Screenshot your trait screen when you change it. Leave the screenshot in your folder for a while (I leave them 6mo+).

To avoid or recover from most loadout issues:

* Do not save loadouts in ground maps [moderate problems] or sector maps [minor problems]

* Do not save loadouts when “Unsaved changes” shows unless you JUST made that change.

* Do not trust that you have the correct loadout on ship switches — visually confirm or manually click the loadout load of your preference, verify trait tab and active doffs window occasionally. [This can change with each patch, so you can usually safetly trust the auto-loadout for the course of a patch.  They do not announce some of these changes though, so it doesn’t matter what the patch *says*]

* Visually check your traits upon entering any TFO or patrol

* EIther just re-saving the layout, or dry-docking a ship->activating it->setting the build up->saving the loadout can repair some of the smaller and more unusual errors that occur with a corrupted loadout.

* Map-changes of any kind can induce a problematic ‘load’ (Entering/exiting TFO/Patrol/Ground/System, any form of space ‘map zoning’)

To save a layout successfully to the map-switch loadout cache:

* Save your loadout (on a single-purpose ship, I just name this “1”)

* Continue until your loadout does not show “Unsaved changes” (Note that it doesn’t *know* if traits changed, so you have no way to be sure it actually changed the saved loadout’s traits until reloading)

* Save the same loadout to a second loadout (I just name this “2”).  If you already have another loadout existing on the ship, you should be able to just switch to that loadout.  This is less about having the loadout saved twice (which is a nice ‘backup’ for certain kinds of bugs but not all) and more about needing to switch into the one you want to save.

* The save-or-switch should have you on the loadout you do NOT want.  Now you select the original (“1”) loadout.  Visually confirm traits at least, but if auto-loadout is working that patch, this will be set until it breaks.

* When bugs damage the auto-loadout, you just need to switch to an alternate layout (“2”) and back to the main (“1”) to reload the proper loadout.

Cryptic/STO things to help understand

* Loadouts are like a tiny little list of gear, imagine a text file with one name on each row.  There’s a non-visible one that represents the current ‘gear’, I refer to this as a cache.

* Cryptic can make changes to skills or the database of skills, which disconnects things from their entry in the loadout.  This has been completely intentional before, but they try to avoid that.

* When you load into a map (‘warp-in’) your ship has a short ‘load’ to go through where it equips all of it’s gear.  Any problems here can result in some bad setups that it can save back off when you change maps again.  If you get in a habit of saving changes to loadouts instead of undoing them, you can end up saving these minor errors more permanently as well.

* High latency connections are prone to more of these issues, but the current state of STO networking is that most people get hit with extreme delays at times.  These are not the sole cause, but they are a key issue with doing things in the right order (which STO is bad at).

• This topic was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Sukobi. Reason: Method#0 added
• This topic was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Sukobi. Reason: Title updated for greater clarity