"Sir, with all due respect, this is a warship, not a salvage vessel." - Capt. Forrester
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[NOTE]: Please do not remove bug/glitch for lack of photographic evidence. Evidence will soon be provided. Feel free to add a bug/glitch if you feel are worthy of note!
This is a catalogue for various glitches and issues related to Interstellar Pilot.
Some of the glitches in this section involve capital ships. Please note you will most likely need to purchase the Capital Ships pack to investigate at least one of these yourself.
Game-session ending glitches[]
The Towing glitch: This glitch requires owning three ships. Enter stations and examine the job boards until you find a job that requires you to tow back an Overlord-classvessel or a Magnus-class vessel. Accept the job and exit the station. Place your ship about 300 units of distance beyond the station and enter your second ship. Tow the disabled vessel almost to the station, making sure you are approaching from the side opposite the one your first ship is parked. Have your third ship dock with the disabled vessel (this can be achieved by targeting the disabled ship, tapping Log, Property, then selecting your ship, tapping Orders, and select 'Dock at my target.'). Pause the game. Order your towing ship to move to the ship on the other side of the station. Enter the ship that has docked with the disabled vessel and unpause the game after tapping 'Exit Ship.' Wait a few seconds and, once the disabled vessel has gotten near enough to the station, it will disappear. Your screen will go black and you will be unable to resume playing until you close out the app and open it again. I do not know if this corrupts save data.
Glitches of interest[]
The Talking Laser Turret glitch: This one requires patience on your part. Destroy a bandit faction but leave their outpost alone. Destroy all the ships that come out and ensure none get past you. Destroy all their laser turrets that are up when you get there. Do not destroy any building ones. Once one begins to be built, blow up the station and then resume normal gameplay. After a while, scroll through the factions list until you reach the faction you blew up. Raise a comms channel with them. If you performed the actions correctly, you should get a response from a talking laser turret named AutoPilot (he has a nasty temper, unfortunately). This can be performed with normal factions as well, as seen in the attached picture (note that this faction's main outpost was destroyed by NPC's, not the player)
The Storage Container that Can't Be Hit By Missiles glitch: Buy a Storage Locker and tow it a little ways away from other stations. Hit it with a few missiles, a mine, or some Small Rockets. Let it slow to a halt, then fire a few more missiles at it. They should not be able to hit the locker; instead, they should begin circling endlessly underneath it or above it. They should despawn if you dock with a station (unconfirmed) or leave the system (confirmed). The Storage Locker is now outside of the normal field of gameplay; missiles will no longer be able to hit it, but laser based weaponry will, and artillery and plasma based ones should as well. This suggests that the enormous asteroids that are a part of some systems are in fact just as real as the ones that are mineable. Interesting, no?
Forced Docking: Not a glitch, per se, but a snub to Bandit factions. You can force a hostile station to allow you to dock by getting near the station, tapping it, bringing up the hotbar menu, tapping Ship, then Orders, then 'Dock at my target.' This is especially handy if you are taking out a faction that spawned more ships than you initially thought it would and they overwhelm your defences.
Safe Stealing: Again, not a glitch, per se, but a little tidbit. Above a certain value of cargo, stealing cargo will immediately make a faction hostile to you. Paying them off can be irritating, as it often costs more than the value of the cargo to appease them. If you steal multiple items from the same faction in succession, they will also start ruining your day. So, to avoid this, take the cargo slowly, so the game doesn't mark it as worthy of note. This can be accomplished by ensuring your cargo bay is nearly full when you start taking the items. Sell off what you get, then repeat. (Note: the amount needed to start a war varies by faction. Best to stick to stealing ammunition with this method).
Self-hitting glitch: To perform this glitch effectively, you should be in command of a Magnus-class or Overlord-class vessel, though it has been repeated in smaller vessels to considerably less effect. *This glitch requires owning two or more vessels. Pause the game after getting your two vessels very near to each other. Tap your other ship, then press Enter. Tap the ship you just left, then unpause the game and pause it again. Tap Enter on that ship. When you enter it , you should be able to select the ship you are in by opening up the hotbar menu and clicking on Scanner. Select your pilot's name if it shows up in the list. Unpause the game and tap some of your weapons. You should be able to hit yourself with them! (does not usually work effectively when in command of smaller vessels due to effective range limits).
Abandoned Station Glitch: This glitch requires the player to incompletely perform the Ship-stealing glitch, preferably with a Magnus-EQ, as those ships lose their faction once stolen. Perform the SSG, but do not assign it to a fleet yet. Purchase a station from a shipyard and order the ship to attack another station, then deploy the station in the cargo bay. Stop the ship from attacking and scan the deployed station. It will be abandoned. You can claim it, but that will not be permanent. Note that it attacks nothing if the station is a Laser Turret, and will not regenerate hull or shield health while classified as abandoned. It will revert to being abandoned once the game is saved, exited, and restarted. There is no way to remedy this that is currently known.
This is a unique glitch that allows the player to take control of an NPC's capital ship. It only works with the Overlord and the Magnus. A player can perform the glitch by either causing the NPC ship to need to dock at a station, or by following one that is going to dock already. Dock with the ship, press the "Exit Ship" button, then wait for it to dock with the station it is heading to. Once it undocks, the player will be able to control the ship. Assign it and unassign it rapidly to a fleet to make owning the ship permanent. Note that without performing this last step, the ship will refuse to follow many of the player's commands, and you may encounter issues with the ship returning to the control of the faction that originally owned it, repeatedly. It will also become "Abandoned" if a save file saved before completing that last step is loaded, though you can regain control of it if you go to the Orders tab and then exit it, clearing the "Idle" autopilot mode. Do NOT dock it with any of your stations and then quit the game before completing the last step of the glitch. It will permanently become docked to your station and will never come out. EVER.
Unconfirmed Glitches (Unrepeated)[]
At certain points in the game we have all experienced the agony of finding a glitch that we have no clue how it happened, or are unsure. This section is especially for those glitches. If you would like to request the aid of the community in determining how this glitch occurred, please post any relevant information under this subheading.
Game-breaking glitches[]
The Keno Duerr Repair glitch: This glitch happened as I was patrolling the Dymapa 753 sector. I happened to have a ship docked with the "Gisela" to monitor its location. I switched to that ship to try to bring it out of the "Gisela", as I needed fighter support. It suddenly docked at a repair station and I was unable to exit. When it left the station, so did I. However, I could no longer play the game. I could not dock at stations for more than 10 seconds, and none of the GUI that you get when docking showed up. To make matters worse, this glitch did not clear up in previous save files. Indeed, all of my save files to that point were gone, except for four that were far at the beginning. The glitch did clear up after restarting my phone. (I am attempting to replicate this glitch to provide evidence, as the phone I performed it on now has a horrible virus on it. I dare not upload any files to the Wiki from it, or it might hurt those who download it). Note that I believe I switched to the ship right as it was docking. EDIT: Has been repeated, still little information on how it happened
Overheating: this one is not so much a game problem as it might be a phone problem. Simply put, the game data for Interstellar Pilot is enormous. For cheap Android phones, this causes a horrendous amount of heat to build up in the game system. The problem gets worse if the phone's CPU has to deal with a lot of game objects at once. When entering sectors with 50 or more ships, I can confirm that the core temperature of a ZTE Citrine Android phone (running Lollipop 5.something) will overheat rapidly, culminating in an emergency shutdown by the phone to protect it. Temperature of the core at this point was around 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Player beware: your phone overheating can cause significant damage to your device and may even be dangerous or cause bodily harm if the battery gets too hot. Please ensure you stop playing if the phone becomes overheated and allow it to cool down.
Too Many Damn Ships: This one is fairly straightforward, but also may be a result of phone limitations. When entering a system with 200 or more ships, a game on a ZTE Citrine phone will crash immediately. There will be no lag and then crash. You will never even exit the wormhole (note: this was performed on the aforementioned virus-affected phone, before the phone became unusable). This will cause the last autosave file to become unusable, as the game will crash as soon as you start it up.
Too Many Damn Stations: Also performed on a ZTE Citrine phone. When entering a system with 50 or more stations, the game will become exceedingly laggy, resulting in relative unplayability until some of the stations are destroyed (simply order your ships to attack them and leave the system). Staying too long will result in overheating and eventual crashing of the game or phone restarting.
(Take this one with a grain of salt, as I heard it through word of mouth) Too Few Damn Sectors: When playing on a custom game with very few sectors, the game can become unplayable simply because there is no chain of income. It was supposedly due to this file being created without any asteroids present. No asteroids equals no mining, which means no economy.
Non-harmful glitches[]
Odd Naming of Ships: Two reports of this glitch have been confirmed with pictures. Occasionally, a ship will spawn with the name of a weapon. This glitch is currently under investigation and attempts are being made to force its replication so that it may be resolved. One such example may be seen to the right.
Drunken Overlord: The picture to the right was posted on the Discord server. It shows an Overlord in a position perpendicular to the normal playing field. This has not been replicated or since seen again as of yet, and it is suspected that the person who posted it was using a modded version of the game.
Entity Box coloration glitch: Occasionally, when starting up the game, a series of actions can be performed that result in a minor corruption of some of the game's data that will clear up as soon as it is restarted. This results in all amorphous entities, such as ship exhaust, lasers, wormholes, and so forth becoming large, purple blocky shapes, and also corrupts much of the text in the game as well as the shield indicators, as seen in the picture to the right (courtesy of Darius Ciprian as he is known on the Discord server). This is not a harmful glitch, so far as is known, and is mildly amusing, in fact. It will clear up once the game is reloaded. A suspected method of triggering it is by opening your device's "Recent apps" screen sometime before, during, or immediately after the "pixelfactor" screen shows up, then immediately returning to the game.
Collision Detection family of glitches: Occasionally, when exiting a wormhole simultaneously with many ships, a number of different glitches can occur. A couple of these include one that causes your ship to be propelled at great speeds away from the wormhole (sometimes even at speeds exceeding 100 units) because your ship's spawn place coincided with that of another's that exited the wormhole; and the "Humping Ships" glitch, where two ships may become entwined with the other (see [add picture] for an example). This latter one was discovered by a member of the Discord server, who posted it after noticing one of his Overlords and one of his Magnuses had become romantically involved, with the resulting abomination cruising along as though nothing had happened. It is likely that there are many more glitches that will occur as a result of faulty or overclocked collision detections, thus this section is named the "Collision Detection family of glitches."
Photon turret glitch: I once encountered a turret in universe 2 that was equipped with a Photon Burst 1 weapon. I have not found any reports about this in the wiki and I have concluded that either this is a glitch or the game has telekinetic powers and is messing with this wiki.
Please do not falsely report glitches or report ones that occurred as a result of modding the game. I can't mod the damn game and I don't have the time to figure out that the reason there's a picture of your pet chinchilla dancing around when you play the lotto minigame is because you screwed up your mod.
