Unconfirmed Bug Sea Hawk quest: CTD on approaching Saint Pierre

[Maria47]

After you steal the French ship from Speightstown. While I was in Bridgetown I got a quest from the Shipwright to get some Linen, thought I'd quickly do that and get it from Martinique and drop it off before heading to Port Royale to give over the ship. But I get a CTD every time I approach Saint Pierre.

I can't imagine the game expects you to do anything other than go straight to Port Royale so I'm hardly surprised, but it means I can't finish the general quest in time since you only get a couple of weeks to do it and a round trip to Port Royale is several weeks.

Attached my save file to see if it can be replicated.

EDIT: Can confirm it's only Martinque. I managed to get the Linen from Nevis.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

@Maria47 does this trigger any error.log files in your main game folder at all?

 

[Grey Roger]

I've had a look at this. Sure enough, if I load the savegame (on worldmap near Barbados) and go straight to Martinique, then switch to sailing mode, the game crashes reliably. On the other hand, if I sail a little way round Barbados to get clear of Speightstown fort and switch to sailing, then go back to worldmap and head to Martinique, I can switch to sailing mode safely. Well, not quite safely - if I go to the port, the fort fires at me.

There are no error messages and no "error.log", but "compile.log" does contain this:

Quest name Story_Follow_Rabel_And_Counterspy_2 FOUND in QuestComplete

That shouldn't happen! "Story_Follow_Rabel_And_Counterspy_2" is part of the quest code which should run while you're in Speightstown port, running away from soldiers towards the dock and your ship. Did you use fast travel to skip that bit and jump straight to the ship?

"Story_Follow_Rabel_And_Counterspy_2" is activated by a 20 second timer, and only seems to crash the game if it triggers while you're in sailing mode. My guess is that I was well within the 20 seconds when I switched to sailing mode near Barbados, originally because I wanted to see what flag you had set before proceeding to Martinique. Doing that took enough time that the rest of the 20 seconds passed while I was back on worldmap and heading to Martinique. And the 20 seconds would also pass if you go past Martinique and head for Nevis.

It also probably means that you wouldn't be able to buy the linen on Martinique anyway because "Story_Follow_Rabel_And_Counterspy_2" sets the game to always see through a false flag - that's to make the French ships at Speightstown attack you even though you're in an ex-French ship flying a French flag. It's why St. Pierre fort fired at me. And even if you land at the beach and walk into town, Arnaud Matton will probably tell you to get lost. (False flags will probably always fail from now on, so don't sail into any other hostile port.)