Sort Numbers - Do they actually do anything?

[Dromedary]

As the title suggests, do sort numbers actually do anything?

For example, most mods, use sort 99 for encounters and patrol paths. Vanilla encounters don’t use this. Instead for encounters with populations, they seem to have a unique number from 1 upwards, separate for each encounter. Background populations use 50, 51 etc. With patrol paths, trade encounters use 74, while attack patrol paths use 76.

My point really is this, can the sort numbers be left at 99 for encounters and patrol paths, or should i follow the numbering etiquette of vanilla?

[adoxa]

It doesn’t look like [c]sort[/c] is used (the only [c]sort[/c] string present in the binaries seems to be related to Lua/Thorn).

[Dromedary]

Which then begs the question, why did they do it differently in vanilla? Unless they changed it later which wouldn’t surprise me at all. Thanks for looking into it Adoxa

[FriendlyFire]

Typically with Freelancer the things either had a use that was removed or were going to be used, but never made it in. Either way, sounds like it’s safe to ignore/remove outright.