FilUnderscore

Hmm strange. Is there anything popping up in the console? Are the mods properly loading but the UI is saying otherwise?

Should be fine to leave them in.

Yeah I believe vanilla pathfinding calculations has support for up to 8? entities at a time, which might be what’s happening. Looking into any changes I could make to improve this in the mod. Could also be related to the new A21 optimisations for zombie pathfinding depending on distance from a player. Still marked as a known issue until I can figure out a way to improve this. I did warn you lol Should do, the mod now handles hordes with its own system. It has disabled vanilla screamers from naturally spawning though since they cause enough havoc around town now.

The settings tab only works for mods that choose to support it through the Mod Manager API (non XML-based mods). Looking into adding support in the future for customizing XML-based mods, but there will be some limitations with this feature. Improved Hordes hasn't been updated to support settings with 2.0.0 yet, but expect them to be available within the next few updates.

Glad you're enjoying it!

MOD MANAGER 1.0.5 for A21 b324 released. Download: https://github.com/FilUnderscore/ModManager/releases/latest/download/ModManager.zip Changelog Fixed NullPointerException when incorrectly parsing mod versions with no build or revision identifiers.

Could you guys share the list of mods you're using so that I can try replicate this issue?

The zombies will despawn when they get out of view distance until you get near them again. Horde count may be dropping due to the biome decay where when they cross over into other biomes they start to shrink unless they return or die out. Should repopulate after 7 days of initial spawns.

Are you running the latest version (1.0.4)? Fixed a bug with mod versions not being properly read. If you're still getting errors, getting a copy of the log would be useful. Press F1 to open the console and click on "Open Logs Folder" in the top right. Feel free to paste the error from the log here or upload the log file to pastebin and link it here. This should help figure out what's causing it. There have been some slight changes to A21 loading mods so I'm working on fixing any bugs that pop up.

MOD MANAGER 1.0.4 for A21 b324 released. Download: https://github.com/FilUnderscore/ModManager/releases/latest/download/ModManager.zip Changelog Fixed Some mod versions not properly being read, leading to indefinite "Loading..." loop when loading mods.

MOD MANAGER 1.0.3 for A21 b324 released. Download: https://github.com/FilUnderscore/ModManager/releases/latest/download/ModManager.zip Changelog Added Refresh button to update and load mods without needing to restart your game. This is currently experimental and may cause issues when loading certain mods. Removed Dependency loading Due to how A21 loads mods compared to A20, this is no longer a viable option.

Yep, but I don't know what other settings they might be changing on top of the ones they've listed already, like MaxSpawnedZombies as you've mentioned. If you're using default setting of 64 zombies, hordes just stop spawning in until you've cleared out some zombies.

Yep, just watch out you don't crash your game with too many zombies. You'll want to run "improvedhordes flush" if you're changing these settings for an existing game to reset all hordes, or wait around 7 in-game days for them to respawn.

Looking into this. The AI system interfaces with the vanilla AI which can cause these weird behaviors sometimes. Most of the bugs have been fixed and some optimization has been done. There are still some relatively minor bugs like AI sometimes ignoring you, but it's running pretty well now I reckon.

IMPROVED HORDES 2.0.0-beta.1 for A21 b324 released. This is an experimental release of Improved Hordes. If you encounter any bugs/performance issues regarding the mod, report them in the Issues section of the repository with the experimental label. Download: https://github.com/FilUnderscore/ImprovedHordes/releases/download/2.0.0-beta.1/ImprovedHordes-Experimental.zip Changelog Added Support for DLL-based Improved Hordes add-ons. Sound events are now properly processed and capped instead of relying on heat values provided by the game. Weapon silencers should work properly and attract less attention, even when used repeatedly. This system may still need a few tweaks here and there, but it mostly works. Share your feedback on how it feels. Re-added chance attribute to horde group entity tags. This will be ignored if no other entities are valid from a selected group. Reduced feral wandering zombie hordes from chance of 1.0 to 0.8 after unlocking them after reaching GS 70. Reduced radiated wandering zombie hordes after unlocking them after reaching GS 180. Wasteland radiated wandering zombie hordes chance reduced from 1.0 to 0.4. Other biome radiated wandering zombie hordes chance reduced from 1.0 to 0.2. Re-added weight attribute to horde group tags. This will be ignored if no other groups are valid within a horde. If no group matches any of the spawn conditions, then the horde is killed off. This replaces the previous chance attribute that was applied on groups (not related to the entity ones!) Added horde_biome_curve_scale setting. This setting controls how aggressive the horde_biome_multiplier scales specifically in the wasteland biome (not much effect in other biomes). Changed max_world_density setting changed to density_per_km_squared Each world has a different size. The max world density should adjust accordingly. The previous value of 350.0 (based on 6144x6144) is now equivalent to 9.3. Lowered screamer delay from 18.0 to 6.0. This change means that screamers will scream sooner when you first encounter them. However, screamers now have a longer delay for each successive scream (3 times). Increased wilderness wandering horde spawns in all biomes. Spawn system improvements. Horde spawning now has a slight delay of 2 ticks between each zombie spawn to reduce stuttering. Improved improvedhordes stats command output to be more informative. Now provides more information regarding main thread requests that are being processed (e.g. zombie spawning, AI updates, etc.) Provides information about the current POI zone (i.e. city/town) you are in, listing attributes such as size, POI count, density and the central point. Provides information about all player groups and their respective players, gamestages, and biomes. Settings are now loaded when needed instead of only once at startup. This fixes a bug where certain settings would not be applied properly. Improved Wandering/Screamer Horde Zone AI Hordes will now wander around more frequently in zones as a single pack, stopping to take breaks as they reach certain parts of town. They will repeat this for a number of times (dependent on zone size & other attributes). Hordes will try to avoid wandering near POIs where Land Claim Blocks are present. Changed minimum town-qualifying POI weight from 4.0 to 3.0. This means a POI is classified as being potentially part of a town if it has 3 or more POIs near it. This should include POIs near the outskirts of a town, as they are still considered part of the town. Reduced horde_biome_curve_scale from 5.0 to 2.0. This should make wasteland POI zones less crowded but still more difficult than other biome POI zones. Increased horde_biome_multiplier from 0.1 to 0.5. Reduced wandering_animal groups Boars and Stags weight from 0.5 to 0.25. wandering_animal_enemy wilderness hordes are now affected by biome difficulty scaling. You will see more aggressive animal hordes in harder biomes as a result of this change. Fixed Fixed NullPointerException when closing a game as the world unloads before the mod shuts down all its threads. horde_biome_multiplier setting not being applied. "Failed to spawn horde cluster" and "Bad spawn location at" warnings fixed with the spawning system improvements. Random cases of horde entity group generation failing and using the placeholder zombieSpider entity class. This should only be used now if you haven't defined all possible cases for group entity spawning as a guaranteed horde measure, letting you know that there are no valid groups with the current game attributes (biome/time of day). Horde entities despawning early when most of the horde has already unloaded. Horde entities sensing invisible players. Player group gamestage being slightly higher than intended. Screamers not causing world event reports when AI Player Sensing is enabled. Removed AI Player Sensing option This has now been fully integrated into the AI system, it was made a setting temporarily for testing purposes. Note: To be honest it was always enabled regardless of the setting in the config file. As mentioned before, certain settings were bugged and not applied when initialized, this was one of those settings upon closer inspection. Good thing the fix made in the previous version worked. Known issues Entities sometimes frozen in place when sleeping, or the game AI lags behind if there are too many entities spawned.

Shows the total number of hordes. Number of zombies is calculated depending on your gamestage, horde density, and the settings in the hordes file. Hmm if anything I would expect the hordes would get bigger slightly faster with these settings. I've slightly nerfed the number of hordes in the wasteland zones next update and added a setting to scale this back to default or change it further. There's some other changes to wandering hordes as well but I'll leave those in the patch notes. No problem! I wanted to find a mod like this but there wasn't anything close back then.

Planning to release the first beta tomorrow, lots of bug fixes and changes coming.

Potentially seems to be an issue with the vanilla movement AI system being overloaded with too many requests at once when large hordes spawn at the same time. Seems to fix itself after a little bit but I am still investigating this as part of the spawn issues I’ve been receiving. Hmm this shouldn’t be happening so it might be a bug to do with unloading hordes, will look into it.

Yeah a log next time would be much appreciated. This is useful information though and could point to some spawn bug with hordes, particularly if you mention it’s happened outside of a blood moon. You can change the size of the wandering hordes two ways: 1. by tweaking the entity counts in the hordes.xml file under Config/ImprovedHordes 2. tweaking the max horde density setting in the settings.xml file under that same folder. This setting is a random capped multiplier that gets applied on top of the hordes.xml numbers. However you can’t limit the number of hordes you encounter in a day and at what time since I’ve moved away from that system (they all roam the map now at all times), you can decrease the number of hordes in the world overall by tweaking the following settings: 1. decrease the max world density 2. change the horde sparsity settings for wilderness hordes (bigger number here means more thinly dispersed) 3. lower the horde biome multiplier (this one is currently bugged and won’t be applied, got a fix in for next update) The hordes do tend to pass by if they’re not at their target yet, however when they reach their destination they wander for quite some time / fall asleep until they feel like moving on. I’m reworking some of the wandering behaviour to have them roam around throughout town instead of having zombies walking around aimlessly individually. I hope at some point to make the horde AI more customisable but that’s a while away.

Hmm can't think of anything that might cause this mod-related and I've only gotten 2 reports about it so far. Are you running the latest version of the mod? The mod doesn't touch blood moons at all so I'm not sure what could be causing it. It could be a vanilla bug but I'm hesitant to say, as that could only be confirmed if there are any reports without the mod. Do you have a log file from that time that you could share that might provide some insight as to what could be going on? You can find it by opening the console and clicking the "Open Logs Folder" in the top right of the window. Uploading it to pastebin then linking it here would be a good start to try figure out what's going on.

Looking into adding an option to limiting how many hordes can be spawned at a time, though it's not going to be easy to track how many hordes are active for a group of players with the current implementation, so still looking into that one. How are you gameplay-wise? Are you in a tougher biome and in a town or out in the wilderness? I have got a working implementation of stealthier sound event tracking coming next update that should help with some of these issues (i.e. guns with silencers will work properly).

Thanks for bringing this up, already been fixed in the next update. It should be safe to ignore in the meantime, it's caused by the world being unloaded faster than the mod can react. I see. I'd expect there to be a mix of standard/feral/radiated, not just one type. Will need to take another pass at the entity selection code. The stutter in this case might also be linked to the fact that you've disabled the entity player spawn limit and increased your horde zombie counts, so the game tries to spawn all of them at the same time. I'm going to see if I can try delay each spawn slightly to make it feel smoother.

Stuttering might be caused by lots of zombies spawning from nearby hordes, still working on optimizing this. I have come across similar issues while developing the add-ons so far. I did find a bug where unloading hordes causes the rest of a horde to spawn before despawning, potentially making the stuttering worse. Good point on the biome game stage multiplier, I haven’t taken a good look at how that’s being calculated by the game. The horde biome count multiplier is applied to an exponential curve that currently has very aggressive scaling in the wasteland, might add a setting and tone it down a notch as well. Trying to balance this out as well. The experience should be capturing the feeling of like a level 1 wandering into a town in the forest and seeing a horde of 8-10 zombies, that but scaled for all levels. Update on this: next version will have a better sound event implementation that has been based off of the game’s sound-specific heat system. It greatly reduces range for silenced weapons unless you’re using a machine gun at a high firing rate.

Yes that says that there is 212 hordes of that type, entity numbers are calculated when you get close to the horde triggering the spawns (based on gamestage and density). Horde density is just a multiplier that is applied to the gamestage calculated entity numbers, and I use the total density number to limit the horde spawns if all other checks when spawning hordes fail. It might seem like a large number but it really isn't when you consider how large the maps are, and more than half of the hordes will be in the wasteland. Some of these hordes will also die out periodically as they cross into other biomes each spawn cycle, as to prevent the world from getting too crowded in the mid/late game.

The mod has changed vastly in functionality in the new A21 version. Instead of spawning in wandering hordes and preventing the game from doing so, it now instead introduces actual hordes in the world that are simulated until you get nearby. In essence, hordes no longer rely on a spawn timer but are instead respawned in the world every 7 days (by default). The benefit this provides is that you will now encounter more hordes out in the world depending on how frequently you travel and where you go. Adventuring in the wasteland? Going to be filled to the brim with hordes wandering between towns. This means that you'll get to encounter hordes more frequently than in the vanilla game, but not of blood moon difficulty. If you type "help improvedhordes" you'll see new commands such as "improvedhordes stats" which tells you how many different types of hordes are currently roaming in the world, as well as the option to reset all hordes and their spawns with "improvedhordes flush". Screamers also work differently in this version and instead of spawning when your heat reaches 100%, they roam around towns and cities now where they can attract nearby hordes on sight. They can still target your base nearby as they have greater heat sensitivity than normal hordes. I still feel like there could be more uses for screamers that I may plan for future updates (perhaps reintroducing them back into spawning by heatmap, but I don't want to fill the world with too many screamers as they can also join wandering hordes and walk around the map).