Tech Tip - Excluding Encounters in Parts of a Zone

Always wondered if that line did anything, now i know. Nice find

I always assumed that population_additive = false prevented the game from spawning ships in damage zones (as this line is often in suns’ & planets’ death zones)

Does the sort = value matter in this respect? Sequence in which the game processes them? Or is that just a NavMap thing?

Anyway, thanks for the tip!!

Population additive = true, is self explanitory, but it’s not used in vanilla.

If you look through all the vanilla system files you will notice towards the bottom of the file there are ambient population zones. Pop type is “background” in all ambient zones. They are basically just there to fill in the empty pockets of the system where other encounters don’t exist.

If you change population additive to true, then the ambient encounters will spawn ships within all other encounter zones they overlap, providing there is capacity remaining within the zone it overlaps.

In most cases the ambient zones concist of pirates and bounty hunters and use a density of 3 ships and the area scout encounter. Simply changing the ambients to pop additive true in new york will have the odd outcast encounter show up at manhattan and rogues at missouri and fort bush for example.

The problem is that the zones do overlap large areas of the system so you will often find twice as many pirates spawning at jump gates and trade lane interruptions, and due to the added volume of ships you’re likely to find no help coming your way.

You can attempt to reballance the existing ambient zones although not entirely necessary, or just create new ones. For instance, you can just create one huge ambient pop zone that covers the entire system with pop additive = true, set up a broad base of factions and encounters within it and then whenever a gap appears these ships will spawn.

Itano circus takes advantage of this method rather well, having hacked the density cap ships can start spawning at a fair rate of knots when you get caught in a tradelane fight, and with all sorts of ships and factions piling into the fight things can get pretty interesting to say the least. Itano circus has been reballanced though, so where it works in that mod it could easily break another mod to pieces. A lot of fun experimenting with this method though, especially if you want a way of throwing capitol ships into the mix at random.