Description:
Since switching my model configuration from direct DeepSeek API to OpenRouter, I am experiencing a total failure of tool executions. While the LLM responses are returned perfectly (the "brain" is working), no tools are actually triggered or executed.
What's happening:
No Tool Execution: Tools like web_fetch, curl, and exec are not triggered.
No Sub-agent Spawning: sessions_spawn is completely broken. The agent claims to spawn a sub-agent, but nothing happens in the background, and no response is ever received from the spawned session.
Chatbot Mode: OpenClaw has effectively become a "pure chatbot" with no ability to perform actions in the workspace.
What I've tried:
Version Testing: Tested the last 4 versions of OpenClaw (2026.4.9, 2026.4.10, 2026.4.11, 2026.4.12) with the same result.
Model Switching: Tried changing the main agent from gemma-4-26b-a4b-it to gemma-4-31b-it via OpenRouter.
Config Verification: Verified that the models are correctly returning text, which suggests the issue is in the tool-calling parsing or the gateway execution layer when using these specific OpenRouter endpoints.
Setup:
Hosting: Containerized (Pterodactyl/Docker)
Providers: OpenRouter (Primary), DeepSeek (Fallback)
Primary Model: openrouter/google/gemma-4-31b-it:nitro
Gateway: Local mode, token auth.
Relevant Config:
(I have my openclaw.json ready and can provide it upon request, with secrets redacted ofc).
Logs:
Container logs are available if needed for further debugging.