Just wanted to know: What is the current state at the update for the manual fireman? Frankly I need to say: I am tired of driving the steam locos with both safety valves open in each station. You can't even use the option "manual fire mode" atm, because of the gltich that creates a "service failed". And the current automatic fire man fires each loco like he/shw want to fly with it to the moon. Driving the 4F doesn't make fun or feels realistic. In the background my XBox Series X is running at the moment ... and the 4F stands in a station, doors open;... but both safety valves open (TV muted, because of ShhhhhhShhhhhhShhhhhh... ) ... and the intake air flappers [or however this thing is called in English] is max. open; so the pressure even rises for no reason ... just to create the annoying ShhhhhhShhhhhh... Annoying ... I hope that the manual fire man (or woman) will fix all this ...
It isn't a glitch, it's behaving correctly. You are letting the fire go out, because with great manual control comes great responsibility.
Maybe, maybe not ... It only says "Service failed", it does not say: "The fire has gone out" or "Service failed: you let the fire go out!" Also there is no fireman (shown) in created scenarios, who works on feeding the fire. I am no a beta-tester. I pay for a complete game, not to test a game and imagine how could an experience be, if the game will work one day. I am tired of this developement in general. Even worse: One sentence could have cleared this glitch/bug (and yes, I call it like that) up. ... if it really is "the fire goes out"-hypothesis. I am not testing it. Don't have time for this. )
Matt from dtg has said multiple times in stream and in forums that you are getting a service failure because the fire goes out. He and his team figured it out themselves during their tests. It's not a hypothesis but a fact. It just doesn't tell you what the cause of the service failure is cuz that's the nature of tsw.
The fireman we have right now is a placeholder. Dont expect it to give you any clues about what is going on with the fire mass or service failure conditions. If you are not following the dev streams, forums and/or beta groups the best you can do is leave it in automatic mode.
And the publisher has said again and again that manual firing is not fully implemented, and only auto-firing is at present supported. If you want to try manual, you do so at your own risk.
Jobwise, I am jointly responsible for an average of about 15 - 20 locations within a radius of 200km. I am It feels like I have some time every 5th weekend. I don't have time to watch every stream or be a member of some beta-club. I saw 5 minutes of one stream ... or was it 2:30 of two different ones? The only thing I check regular is the shop; - even posting in here often makes me mourn my weekend time. There is no warning in the menu; strange, because there was one if you the save-game feature was new. ~ Thx for the hints @all.
I understand your position and if I were in your shoes I think I would do the same. My advice to you is to leave the fireman in auto for the time being since the manual one is an "alpha" feature that is not ready to be used by people with normal playing habits. I think there should be a setting in TSW, like many other games have, that says something like "show me experimental features" that defaults to off. You would then need to change that to "on" to see options that are not fully developed and tested (like the manual fireman).
Done, I keep it on automatic (again). 100% agreed; should be an option to turn experimentals on/off. So people (like me - who just want to play without hitting something -) can turn that things off - or shouldn't wonder if they hit somthing "unusual". If I would have some more time for games (like 15 years ago) - I wouldn't have any problems helping and testing a bit. But at the moment it's just not possible; that's why I would like to be left out.
This topic has been not mentioned for a while: Nothing in the October 2023 road map - nothing after TSW 4 release. Is the manual fireman frozen or dead (as project)? Would be realy bad, because I still hate the automatic fireman; and the fact that he is nearly blowing up the loco again and again. I can open and close the fire hatch if I set firemode to manual or supported ... but it seems to have no effect. The "you lose" glitch appears even then, if I let the fire hatch open all the time. Why not create a mode, in which the AI puts water and coal inside the loco (automatically) and the player can control flaps, vent and so on?! - As an alternative: If the manual fireman is dead. Each parked steam loco (after a player used it (!)) has at least one opened safety valve :/
My approach is - I play with manual fireman. As soon as the game starts I open the firebox, and then I don’t touch it again for the rest of the journey. If I close it, I get ‘service failure’ within a couple of minutes, which is obviously not realistic, but as long as I leave the firebox open, it seems to be OK. The benefit, of course, is this means I get control over all of the other controls. Obviously this technique is not realistic, but it seems to be as close as we can get with the current set-up.
