dundarrion

thanks for the feedback, im really happy you made good use of the chicken method. Here is the save file I used btw: https://www.nexusmods.com/reddeadredemption2/mods/3693

Hey lovely people, I wanted to shill my video on the topic here, hope its OK. I offer up a very good way of measuring the level if ''fuckiness'' your game is at currently with mods. Please watch it on 1.5 or 1.75 speed if you are interested in the topic because its incredibly BORING! you have been warned. Next part will be a modding guide for beginners and not-so beginners

Im not sure I undestand u correctly but every "update_1" "update_2".... etc should be just update:/xxxxxx/xxxxx in install.xml

Again, I understand what you are saying but I installed these mods specifically to break the game. I personally wouldnt play with whyem dlc or red dead offline just because of personal taste. But the thing is we really need some definitive way to break these spawns or how to break them because Im not sure what to do. Now I managed to break the spawns finally by mismatching some catalog settings first of all, then buying an invisible item from the trapper whyem wardobe menu, then I went ahead and died near a train, saved then reloaded the save and trains seem to be broken (used railroad enginner to track them because there is no other way I can think of right now, maybe thats also part of the problem. who knows at this point) FUnnily enough tram passengers are still spawning, so what the conclusion? That the whole thing is nonsense. PS: thats a huge amount of mods by the way that you are using im surprised that you are not having issues at this point :D

I understand where you are coming from, but let me rephrase the quesiton then. How do you actually MAKE the trains stop spawning? I have been experimenting with well over 100 mods now with WHYEM+RDO and Terrain Textrues overhaul just the ''normal'' stream setup and trams still have people, I still see roseta spoonbills, Trains are still spawning, I have been using railroad engineer to track them for now, and they are always there. All this with full vanilla gameconfig on a save that is not even new.... So how do I definitively stop trains form spawning then? What do I need to do? Tried completing a mission with this setup, save/load manually. I want to break the spawns in the game so I can have a test ground for repair but its impossible to do now for some weird reason

- double post

so the problem is again, how to reliably check for train spawns? Railroad engineer sometimes can track them, sometimes they lose track of them until you reload a save file... is that considered a train bug or railroad engineer bugging out? Scripted trains will always spawn, so for example when you load a save file near a station or when you are in a mission etc... these will spawn on a game that is heavily modded as well So what would be the best way to reliably track if we are getting spawn issues or not? rely solely on tram passengers? It's hard to tell what is a "scripted train" and what would be a normal train "in the wild". THis might be why sometimes people think that their spawn issues are actually resolved when it is not

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.