Encounters and Spawns
Spawns and ambushes are derived from the encounter objects.
When creating encounters, it is good to give it the same tag, resref, and name so builders can see the name for variable use at a glance.
The "Difficulty" field is used to determine the percentage chance of a "unique" creature being selected. Generally, this is used for harder or more rare enemies that should spawn as part of the pack.
- Very Easy: 5% chance of unique
- Easy: 10% chance of unique
- Normal: 15% chance of unique
- Hard: 20% chance of unique
- Impossible: 25% chance of unique
Based on the above image, 85% of the time a Drow Archer or Drow Fighter will be selected. 15% of the time will select a Drow Assassin, Drow Marksman, etc.
TODO: Extend script to allow maximum creatures and minimum creatures to determine min and max random spawns
The above is how encounters are set.
- random#: The resref of the encounter object to use
- random#_spawns: The average amount of creatures to spawn. This is random - for example, if there are 10, then when an area is initialized/refreshed there will be between 7-13 or something like that.
- random#_ambush_size: The exact number of creatures to spawn from an ambush. TODO: Fallback to max/min creatures to determine random spawns if not set
- ambush: If set to 1, this area has the chance of causing resting ambushes. Only random1-random6 entries are used for creating ambushes. NOTE: Do not skip a number when setting spawns! i.e. don't do random1, random2, and skip to random5
There are special creatures that marks locations as spawn points. They will be deleted when a server starts, but their location will be used to generate places where creatures will spawn. The spawn points will be used randomly when determining spawns.
You don't have to use spawn points. Generally, what I do is a combination of both - random spawns and hand-placed (hard) spawns.