Chunk the chump

that will be the primary format, yes

I am working on a comprehensive modding guide for RDR2 that will include this topic as well in detail. ETA this week

For the life of me I dont understand why people are so attached to Whyem DLC when most of them even admit they only use it for 1 or 2 items. The same with RDO, it bloats up the game immensely and add things like "improved bow" or bolas that you never use in single player anyway. First thing to do if you want a stable game is to just top using these bloated messes or just live with bugs and wardrobe issues/disappearing equipment /clipping etc.

I went through and read a lot of this thread (not all) because I am also interested in solving the spawn issue. All this time people were using railroad engineer to check for train spawns but that mod by itself affects trains in some manner and when you die on a train or close to it it won't be able to track them anymore (train blip icons still move they just wont be there.) Tested this with no no other mods, no lml files. So the question is how to reliably test the spawns. Below I will try to summarize my findings somewhat, because I became opsessed with the spawn system of this game over the past 2 months I've been trying to mod it heavily. I will keep updating it with my findings overtime. trains are not supposed to run all the time even in vanilla, so this railroad engineer method is completely unreliable as it keeps spawns in memory all the time. In my testing on vanilla the game spawns trains when you enter certian areas, or checkpoints if you will, then a train will spawn (usually relatively far away) and makes it way towards the player. Even if you start running the whole of the railway system trains are not guaranteed to spawn even on a vanilla game. The answer is: Test, test and test some more. the best thing you can do is load the same save file all the time and experiment via teleportation or just run some lenght of the railway until you get comfortable where a train is supposed to be coming from ( and time it so you know approximately how long it takes). Once you got that down to a semi-exact timeframe DO NOT start adding mods just yet. Now go ahead and look for a second train and again, make sure you are able to consistently able to find it in a given timeframe after you found the first train. (PREFERABLY finding a third train might be even more beneficial for the results) Now you can start adding mods 1 by 1 (preferably by the replacement method) and test the spawns every single time. Also check for animal spawns, you are not supposed to see animals spawn very close to you when you just turn the camera (you know they just spawned because they are still doing grazing or whatever animation and havent reacted to you being there) Check for horse spawns, check for small rodents like muskrats in river bed. If you see like 20 deers or proghorns at once thats also not a good sign, means the memory management is acting up (can happen if you use vestigia's popzone spawner file edits for example) No gameconfig (tested them all the only one that is helpful for the game is that stutter fix texture pool increase), no systemsettings file are going to help you in this. And of course, needless to say do not use stupidly high res textures like the popular one on Nexus that has 8gb of textures, this will kill your game's internal memory management. Edit2: For example, my testing ground is the following: I use this simple intro completed save file: https://www.nexusmods.com/reddeadredemption2/mods/3693 1. Get on horse (u can use rampage for the next steps) 2. Turn on superspeed, I usually leav it on default 35 speed 3. Head towards the first Reverend Swanson (RS) blip (this could be a scripted spawn, not sure, but all spawns are kinda scripted if you believe this checkpoint method I theorized above, which I do believe. Even animals spawn points are scripted tucked away in the respective region scenario .ymt files) 4. A train MUST spawn coming from the north over the bridge. 5. Once that is confirmed, I usually teleport myself down to Saint Denis outskirts, where the animal corrals are 6. I make my way through the city (just quickly checking the trolley pasengers, note that not every trolley will be full of passengers, dont panic if you find 1 empty, but definitely not a good sign if multiple trolleys are empty) 7. I leave SD following the railway to the north towards the heartlands - the one that goes through the swamp inlands 8. A train MUST spawn coming towards you somewhere along the line before you reach the next station in the middle of the heartlands.

Just for the record your linked mod also causes the same issues, it breaks encounters just the same. It also breaks some online weapons and horse coat variants so version.dll is still a better choice. Additionally the author if the mod seem to have gone AWOL and locked all discussion regarding the bugs and also it is not listed anywhere what kind of encounters that mod supposedly fixes.