Solution and suggestions below to complete Southern Routes (keeping original post for context)

First campaign attempt, and I've hit Southern Routes. I've spent over a year game time trying to get 3/3 and 3/3 and after so many attempts I've literally lost count, I'm still only 2/3 of first 3, and 0/3 of the entire Southern Routes mission group. Every single time, I get a redirect mission. I've ignored the redirect, done the mission and except the 2/3 that I've managed to get actual credit for, the vast majority of the time, (again, lost count how many attempts) I don't get credit for them. It's breaking the entire game for me. You have the historical time limit to complete things, but you don't get credit for doing them. Southern Routes takes days to get to, do the goals and not get credit at least 10 times so far no matter how I try to complete these missions means that other stuff isn't getting done and my OCD and the completionist in me has me near uninstalling.

First, I think it's bugged, and needs to be fixed asap. Second, if it's not bugged, please ELI5 how to get the green checkmark on this because I just don't have anymore patience to spend an hour getting there, completing the 7k ton goal and getting ZERO credit for it. My keyboard can't take much more abuse. Please help!

Edit/solution with caveats:

You only get credit for inspecting freighters flying neutral flags, determining if they're friend, foe or actually neutral, then acting accordingly. An example would be a ship flying a Spanish flag, inspect, determine if route and cargo is destination appropriate. You can check what cargo each port imports and exports from the map by mousing over the port icon. If the cargo and destination match, and they're sailing in that general direction, let them go and radio bdu. If they have mismatched cargo or they're sailing in the opposite direction to the destination port, then have them evacuate and abandon ship. Then get back to your boat and radio bdu. A single credit for either situation.

One thing I learned is that the direction they're sailing doesn't always have meaning. I inspected many neutral ships (I forget how many total, but over 15 for sure) which, the cargo and ship direction matched and some where they didn't match. Out of every decision I made, I only made one mistake and sunk a truly neutral ship. There is one instance where I inspected a ship flying a Spanish flag, and they were sailing away from their destination port. Since there's limited pressure options, I used the navigation challenge and the captain showed me his map (via text, unfortunately no actual map) that he was indeed on the correct route. He was acting nervous prior to the challenge, so I assumed based on his current course and nervousness, I should sink it. I was wrong. I don't know why I was wrong, and why he was sailing in the opposite direction, but it happened. A front page news article when I returned to port assured me, I did sink a neutral ship.

Suggestions from being one of the 0.2% who's completed Southern Routes (as of 01/25/2025) and help from Red_Seven_.

-The inspections aren't shown as part of the mission parameters or shown on the task list. The only way that I know of that you can see your credit for Southern Routes, is by checking the campaign tab from the drop-down or clicking directly on the Southern Routes box on the map. Click on or scroll down to Southern Routes and it will show your current inspection count. I only saw the mission goals telling me to patrol for however many kilometers and optionally sinking 7k tons of enemy ships. Reading my original post, you can see I had been stuck on 2 of 3 in stage 1 of 3. It seems that I didn't understand where the credit was coming from. I had inspected a couple of ships early on, but didn't see any notifications, so I assumed the credit was from sinking ships in the patrol area. I kind of assumed I had to find ships who were flying fraudulent flags and sink them as part of the mission goal because it has the optional sinking tonnage. Neither is true. You get credit from inspecting neutral ships, period. You just need a lot of inspections, at least 15, maybe 24? You can completely ignore the patrol travel distance, the optional sinking and just do inspections and determining the future for said captain.

-You can stack inspection credit. Even though it's in three stages of growing numbers of required inspections, you can take a single trip and amass as many as you're capable of with food/fuel, etc.

-Ignore everything between your home port and the green patrol box. bdu loves to send route/mission changes during Southern Routes and simply clicking on the mission removes any chance of getting credit for anymore inspections until you go back home and get a new attempt at the mission. I think this should be changed.

-I need clarification to determine the proper use of Milk Cow here, though. As per Red_Seven_, I used milk cow, but it broke the rest of the mission for me, at least on the current trip I was on at that time. The reason I believe it broke, is because initiating Milk Cow requires calling and then responding to bdu to get it set up. Once you respond to bdu, even if it's just to respond to the single Milk Cow message, to get the coordinates, at least on my playthrough, ended my Southern Routes mission immediately because of the stack of other bdu messages I had already ignored to get there were immediately shown in my journal. So, I reloaded a save and tried again, but no matter how I tried to get Milk Cow while also getting further Southern Routes credit, I could not. But I kept the credit for all of the inspections I had completed prior to calling bdu. To continute Southern Routes, I had to return to port, get the Southern Routes mission.........................again... and finish up. After reading and following Red_Seven_'s suggestions, I did figure it out and their information was mostly correct. The only addendum I would offer is that I don't know how to use Milk Cow here unless bdu somehow doesn't initiate any course or mission changes prior to using it?