I've been playing Shipwrecked and have been noticing a lot of buggy behavior with Ballphin Palaces and Ballphins.
The red and blue dots seem to be spawners for herds of homeless ballphins. And yes, the blue one is on land for some reason. And I know the spawner is there cause it keeps spawning ballphins and there's an "empty" space where I can't build anything.
(What I assume is the homeless ballphin spawner. No ballphins right now, but I've removed a lot of land-bounded ballphins with TheInput:GetWorldEntityUnderMouse():Remove() in the past.)
But the actual problem lies in the ballphins that spawn from the Ballphin Palaces. For some reason, a lot of them have a tendency to swim away from their homes. I tried following them a couple of times, and it appears they are heading to one of the homeless ballphin herds. Sometimes they follow (or try to follow) the yellow route towards the herd at the red dot.
Others time they just get stuck swimming against the shore near their homes, but not actually going on land. After I discovered there was a land-bounded homeless ballphin spawner, I used my boat to push one of the ballphins that was swimming against the shore into the land and the ballphin immediately headed towards the blue dot.
I'm assuming some of the homeless ballphin code is reused for the palace-spawned ballphins and it causes the latter to seek out herds of homeless ballphins, even if said herd is several screen away. And, of course, once the ballphins swim far enough, they become unloaded and thus never return to their homes, not even at dusk/night, unless you go find them and escort them back. (But they'll just leave again on the next day.)
On top of that, I've been having trouble getting ballphins to mine coral for me.
This is my coral farm. I've only tried to mine it twice and each time I've enlisted the help of the ballphins that have stayed near their houses instead of running away and the occassional homeless ballphin herd that spawns nearby. But they rarely if ever give me a hand with the mining. Last time I tried to do it, I was only able to get them to mine 3 of the leftmost 4 boulders. The other 17 I had to mine myself cause the ballphins just didn't seem to get the memo. They just swam happily back and forth while I mined the coral, but didn't actually help me. In fact, they didn't even seem to notice it.
I could provide a save file if need be. (Just tell me where to find it.)
Ballphins swimming far away from home just kinda happens on its own. For the mining issue, I just feed them fish from my fish farms, have them follow me to the reef and start mining with my pickaxe, but they don't do anything to help. Only mods I use are Geometric Placement, Finder and Health Info.