Pleae post some screenshots to show how you have set up your layers and the autorouter tabs. Better would be to post the link to a public project that illustrates the issue. Thanks.

   

In Autorouter, the planes are not selectable and are left our by the router

You haven't shown how the Skip Nets tab is configured. What happens if you enter GND and VCC as nets to skip in the Skip Nets tab? Does the autorouter then skip routing pins on those nets completely?

The question was not how to skip GND and VCC from being routed. The skip nets page is empty. When I define them to be skipped, yes they are skipped by the router

"The question was not how to skip GND and VCC from being routed." I understand that. I have no experience of using the autorouter on more than 2 layers so I was wondering what the difference was between them being skipped or not. What about if you route the VCC and GND connections manually to the relevant planes and then skip them and let the auto router do all the other nets.

Yes that's what would be a workaround, I think I just overvalued the autorouter and thought it could manage that for me, but as far as I see it is not too common that people rely on autorouting

Unless you pay a lot of money for an autorouter or are routing an essentially  low (edge) speed board, an autorouter is a quick way to get into a lot of crosstalk, signal and power integrity and EMC trouble. I played with this one a few months ago on a complex but slow edged 2 layer PCB (4000 series cmos running at 32kHz) and ran it several times then hand adjusted the bits I wasn't happy with. Overall it might have been faster than doing it by hand but I put a lot of placement effort into a board to try to optimise routing before I start pushing any copper so difficult to tell. Trouble is if the board is simple enough to safely autoroute then it's simple enough to do by hand but if it's complex enough to be trashed by an autorouter then it needs to be done by hand. :)

Hello other Markus! I suggest to route your signals manually. You don't learn anything about routing if you just apply autorouter continuosly. Just be brave and give yourself a chance to learn about PCB design by routing your boards manually. Regards, Markus Virtanen HW / Electronics Designer