Introduction

This mod was designed to be a flexible framework that will handle nearly all spawning of NPC grids in your game world. It's been built to be compatible with existing NPC mods, while also providing new and powerful options to add extra variety and control to how NPC grids appear in the game.

Why Was This Mod Created?

For a while, I've wanted to create a spawning system that would replace the existing spawning system for cargo ships and random encounters (mostly because of inconsistancies in when it works and inflexibility of options available to it). One thing that concerned me was that I would likely be creating a lot of duplicate code that is already used in the Planetary Cargo Ships and Planetary Installations mods, which would be inefficient and cost extra performance for no good reason.

So I made the decision to create a mod that merges the functionality of the Planetary Cargo Ships and Planetary Installations mods, along with the NPC Cleanup and Performance mod. This also gave me the opportunity to modernize the code for those spawners so they perform a bit better. On top of this, I've also added a rewritten Cargo Ship spawner and Random Exploration Encounter spawner for Space (These two options should be disabled in your world settings since this mod handles their spawning now). This mod will work fine out-of-the-box, but also has several configutation options available to players and admins who want to tune their experience or performance.

What Does This Mod Handle?

This mod will take care of the spawning and despawning of several types of NPC grids.

- Space Cargo Ships - These encounters are one of the oldest types of NPC Grid Encounters. They appear near player proximity every so often and travel in a fixed path for a while before despawning.

- Lunar Cargo Ships - This is a new type of encounter. These encounters are essentially the same as Space Cargo Ships, however they will only appear near players that are within a shallow gravity field (Eg: Moons).

- Planetary Cargo Ships - These encounters are similar to Lunar Cargo Ships, only they will appear close to the surface of larger planets.

- Random Encounters - These encounters are discovered as players explore the game world. They often appear as Unpowered Neutral grids or sometimes as Pirate Stations. One change that has been made to these encounters is that they're no longer tied to the world seed in regards to how they appear, but now use the player travel distance and a timer (similar to Planetary Installations).

- Planetary Installations - These encounters appear on the surface of planets as static grids / stations. They appear as players travel and explore the surface of the planet.

- Boss Encounters - This is a new type of encounter. When this spawn is triggered, a GPS marker is created near the player. Once the player approaches the GPS marker, a difficult NPC encounter will appear.
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Features and Functionality

Here's a list of some of the new options this mod enables for NPC Grid Encounters:

- Distance From World Center - This mod enables modders to specify that certain Encounters will only appear once the player is a minimum or maximum distance from the world center (0,0,0). One example of how this can be used is to make more difficult encounters appear as the player ventures further from the center of the game world.

- Custom NPC Factions - Spawned NPCs can easily be assigned to a Custom NPC faction without needing to rely on extra scripts to manually change their ownership after they've spawned.

- Territories - Modders can setup specific territories in the game world where certain encounters will only appear. One example of how this could be used is to setup a zone between a planet and a moon where you can encounter more commercial cargo ships and transports.

- Blacklist Spawn Groups and Grid Names - Let's say there's a particular encounter you have a hard time dealing with, but the mod author is too stubborn to provide an option to remove it in the mod. With this mod, you can blacklist the spawn group so that it's removed from the spawning pool!

- Modded Encounters - This mod gives modders the ability to specify a list of mods that must be loaded with the game world before a specified encounter can spawn. One example of how this could be used is you could have 2 variants of a ship - one vanilla and one with a few modded blocks. If the required mods for the modded block variant are loaded, then that encounter would be able to appear, otherwise it would not.

- Clean-up Settings - Each Encounter type (Cargo Ships, Boss Encounter, Planetary Installations, etc) have their own clean-up settings in their configuration files. This allows you to specify how and when ships should be removed from the game world to keep things running smoothly.

- Spawn Group Max Frequencies - If there's an encounter mod you like using, but it seems to use very high spawn group frequencies (which would reduce the odds of other encounters appearing), you can enable a max frequency for each encounter type (Cargo Ships, Boss Encounter, Planetary Installations, etc).

- Unique Spawn Groups - Modders can specify if an encounter should only appear once in the game world. After the encounter appears, it would not be able to appear again in that game world.

- Planetary Encounter Options - This mod allows modders to specify rules for what kinds of planets their planetary encounters can spawn on/near. Options include planet blacklists/whitelists, min/max planet size, and if the planet has an atmosphere, oxygen, and or vacuum.

- ....And Much More!
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Configuration and Modder Setup

For details on how to modify settings and setup your own mods to use this spawning system, please see the guide at this link.

Compatibility and Warnings:

Simply run this mod with any other mod(s) that add NPC grid encounter content (Eg: Reddit Custom Encounters, Air Traffic, Surface Occupation, Etc). This mod will identify the spawn groups included in those mods, regardless of whether or not they were setup to use the advanced features of this mod.

Restrictions Regarding Republishing This Mod:

Please refrain from republishing this mod on the workshop. Because this mod is used as a dependency by many other mods, it will likely auto-load this mod with any cloned instance - which will cause unstable behavior as a result of 2 instances of the spawner running. If this is not respected, I will exercise my right as the original creator and file DMCA notices against infringing copies at my discretion.

Known issues update 1.189

Keens new Asteroid Bases do not spawn aligned properly. I am still working on a fix for this.

Modular Encounters Collection Discord Server

If you're interested in getting involved with the mods in this collection, and future projects, check out our Discord Server:

For Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about the mods I maintain, please click here

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“Copyright 2018 Meridius_IX / Lucas. This item is not authorized for posting on Steam, except under the Steam account named Meridius_IX / Lucas”