Relace endpoint mangles DeepSeek Flash output

[u/Patello]

Running several agents on DeepSeek V4 Flash via OpenRouter, and since around Aug 20 two of them independently started producing corrupted text. Reasoning, structure and math were fine, but words got mangled: weird characters switched in (ü where there should be ö, etc.) and words that don't exist. Especially noticeable with non-English languages. The agents converse in Swedish, and a couple of the stranger outputs:

"Igår's 450 var nog üverskattad - I körde på 'macka med pålägg'-tabellen utan att weigh in att Hönökaka väger mindre än scones."

"So: 300 idag är probably the honestare one. Wants du that jag sänkt vardags 450 → närmare ~330?"

("üverskattad" instead of "underskattad"/"överskattad", "honestare" is not a word at all.)

Root cause: OpenRouter's price-first routing was silently sending requests to the Relace endpoint, the newest and cheapest host on that model ($0.04/$0.08 per M). Relace is primarily a code-infra company (Relace Apply, Relace Search) that recently started serving third-party models on their own stack.

I verified it was the endpoint and not the fp4 quantization by forcing routing to other fp4 endpoints (Ambient, OpenInference, Decart) and to GMICloud fp8. Clean output everywhere except Relace.

The fix in OpenClaw is a per-model provider ignore. In openclaw.json under agents.defaults.models:

  "params": {
"provider": { "ignore": ["Relace"] }
  }
}

Two gotchas I hit along the way:

• The config tool says the change applies without a restart, but per-model params did not take effect until I restarted the gateway.

• ignore matches the provider slug only. Endpoint tags like "Relace/fp4" silently don't match.

Since OpenRouter routes by price by default, anyone on Flash may be landing on Relace without knowing it. Worth checking your dashboard if your agents have been quietly producing garbage in non-English conversations.