Not all merms are teleporting home.

They will currently only start the teleport process once they unload from all players called entity sleep. The process lasts for however long it would take the Merm to travel back to their home which is a variable amount of time. If a player walks close enough to one of the Merms during this process the process resets entirely until the Merm goes back into entity sleep. Please let me know if you feel this is not the case but I have tested quite a few cases with this mechanic trying to break it.

1 hour ago, JesseB_Klei said:

They will currently only start the teleport process once they unload from all players called entity sleep. The process lasts for however long it would take the Merm to travel back to their home which is a variable amount of time. If a player walks close enough to one of the Merms during this process the process resets entirely until the Merm goes back into entity sleep. Please let me know if you feel this is not the case but I have tested quite a few cases with this mechanic trying to break it.

@JesseB_Klei They have been unloaded for the whole of winter and half of spring at this point and still haven't teleported home. 

 

I did some testing and I think I know how the mechanic broke. 

Here's what I did:

1. Tame a merm (I tried it with a merm guard and active king).

2. Go on boat, make sure the tamed merm stays on land and can't teleport anywhere when it gets unloaded.

3. Row boat far off shore until the merm gets unloaded. 

4. Relog while the merm is unloaded (not sure if necessary)

5. Row back to the merm and kill a fish to untame it (if reloading did not untamed it)

5. Observe how the merm will never return home. 

 

I tried this twice and both times the merm did not teleport home. The second time I had a control merm that was on the boat with me and the other merm was left on shore and unloaded. The control merm teleported home after a little while but the one left on shore did not. 

24 minutes ago, fall211 said:

4. Relog while the merm is unloaded (not sure if necessary)

Thanks! This is a case I missed. The reason for the issue is that the follower component does not fire off a loseloyalty event from the owner of the component and that event is what triggers the teleport process flag. I will work on getting this fixed before the next-next hotfix.

This will be out in the next hotfix and not the one that released a moment ago.

Changed Status to Fixed