Persistent Jobs

This mod changes the job and car spawning system such that jobs and cars are kept in stations even if you leave them for a longer period of time. This way, you can shunt, build larger consists of cars of multiple jobs that go to the same destination, haul to one destination and come back for the next. Everything will be as you left it.

If you finish (or abandon) a job, the cars of that job will be reused for new jobs. Finishing a shunting unload job will leave those cars jobless for some time. Once you leave the station and come back again a bit later, those cars will have new jobs reassigned to them!

Stations only generate new cars once, when you enter them the first time. This also means that cars are finite once all station have generated.

This is a continuation of the great work that Niko Fox (fauxnix) started with the original but discontinued Persistent Jobs mod.

Questions and Bugs posted here on Nexusmods will likely not be looked at. Development and issue tracking takes place on GitHub.


Frequently Answered Questions (FAQ)

My Shunting Load  job ends on the L track. Why is that?
After the loading step, you can directly validate your job order. Hence you are not forced to bring the cars to an O track that the game chooses for you. You are free to take the cars to any O track of your choice or you can take the subsequent FH order and haul the cars to their destination directly.

The job validator machine buzzes at me when I want to take a Shunting (Un)Load job.
In order to accept a shunting job, the cars cannot be on the loading track already. No more time cheating for you!

I completed a Shunting Unload or Logistical Haul order but the cars just stay there and no new job is generated for them.
After a job chain is complete, cars stay jobless for while. You need to leave the station (do something else) and come back after a while, then those cars will have a new job assigned to them!

The job said i need to take the cars to track A, but after accepting the job this changed to track B.
In order to understand this, we first need to make a little detour. In vanilla, job chains are always generated on the fly. If you leave a station, all unaccepted jobs and their cars simply vanish. This means that the game can reserve track space for the complete job chain (SL-FH-SU or LH) in advance. It also means that all stations are always mostly empty when you are not there.
With PersistentJobs, this changes completely. All cars and jobs all over the map persist. For a job starting in station X, reserving space at destination Y just because you could (but currently don't) haul cars there is not useful, especially when you are at station Z.
Therefore, PeristentJobs delays track space reservation to the point where you accept the job. It tries to reserve space on the specific destination track A (according to the job) first, but that can fail in case you could have already accepted other jobs reserving that space, or brought other cars to A that block the track. If this is the case, PersistentJobs tries to find another suitably free track B and you then see the destination track changing when accepting a job.

But my job booklet cover (or any other method where i can inspect the destination track) does not reflect that update, it still shows the old track. Help!
In vanilla, there is no such feature. The first point where you can see the destination track is in the job detail pages, and those reflect the changed destination track. There are some mods that are currently unaware of destination tracks changing. Those mods will need to handle this situation and you are free to report an issue for this in the respective mod's issue tracker.
If you would like a more dynamic view of where your cars are and where they need to be taken, have a look at the Derail Valley Dispatcher Mod.


Version History

3.2.1

• Fixes a mod crash when cars are derailed and are requiring a new job to be assigned to them
• Avoid a warning message about unknown job types for passenger jobs
• Shows a MessageBox when the mod crashes, thereby making it (a bit) more obvious that the mod is inactive after a crash and the game should be restarted, as otherwise vanilla logic takes over and begins despawning cars
• Therefore, added the MessageBox library as a dependency
  

3.2.0

• Complete rewrite of the cars reuse / job reassigning algorithm that will now generate multi-pickup SL jobs and should be able to handle all situations of jobless cars
• Add some more console commands (they all start with 'PJ.')
• Fix mod crash in a particular situation where a station is first visited with the mod active, but had some cars already from pre-mod
• Fix mod crash due to interaction with Custom Car Loader and custom car types having a 'NotSet' cartype
• Log mod exceptions to a separate file (one per crash)
  

3.1.0

• Fix job chain SL -> FH -> SU not always immediately generating the next job in the chain. Generate those subsequent jobs even if no space can be found on any suitable track destination track
• Fix only part of a consist being reassigned to new jobs even if all cars are jobless
• Fix SU jobs dropping off onto more tracks than there are cars in the consist
• Prevent SU jobs from directly generating subsequent LH jobs. After SU, jobs will stay jobless until they get assigned a new job (when you leave the station)
• Add console commands to regenerate jobs for a specific consist immediately
• Fix a mod crash when a car is on/over a switch and attempting to generate a job for it
• Fix crash when player spawned cars are converted to regular cars during job generation
• Do not clear station spawn flags when the mod crashes or is disabled from the mod manager dialog. If necessary, there are console commands to interact with the flags
  

3.0.0

• Initial port to Simulator
• Compatibility with multiple savegames/session system
• Revamped jobs/car generation (when first visiting a station)