Random Encounters & Pirate Questions

With cargo ships disabled due to the lack of ability to deal with planetary gravity I need to find a workaround for custom pirates and encounters. I see that there is a frequency stat in the files that you can edit similar to the spawn rate of cargo ships. My question to the community or staff is how does the frequency stat work? Is there a set chance for an encounter that is checked in a given time period as the player is flying around, or does the game make an "encounter check' or something to that effect when a player loads new objects into their sight range? I tested this by cranking the frequency of one of my custom ships to 5000 and seeing if it made an impact in the rate it showed up and after 30 min of flying around I saw nothing. I am asking so that I can adjust how often encounters happen and I also would like to know if the pirate spawns are grouped into encounters or are they a separate spawn table? Also, I have heard several questions about cargo ships and when they would be accessible again, if they wont be in the near future while keen is focusing on bug fixes and optimization can an option be implemented for those of us who use custom cargo ships that are able to deal with planetary gravity so that we can use them again? If there is another way to control the frequency of encounters both neutral and pirate please help. THANKS!

 

Random encounters spawn automatically and randomly a couple thousand kilometers away from you, And pirate spawns are simply random areas with a pirate station/base with a few drones spawning around it. If your trying to get a npc ship for the loot just wait for one to spawn.

 

I am hosting a world and am trying to understand HOW the spawning specifics work so that I can adjust the spawning rates for my players.

 

Afraid the frequency stat is simply how likely it is to choose that ship when it does spawn a pirate/neutral ship.
Both pirates and neutral "encounter" ships spawn in the same way, sometimes close enough for the pirates to attack.

Most of the settings you want to play with are hard coded into the game.
See: https://github.com/KeenSoftwareHous...ndbox.Game/Game/World/MyNeutralShipSpawner.cs

 

Thanks! That was exactly what I needed to know.

 

Thanks for the tip. I never understood why they don't make more of the game tweakable with a .cfg file override. Even if it's not tweakable in the GUI, an XML setting change would be great for custom servers or even just testing the limits of the game without having to recompile lines of code.

 

For anyone interested, I did some research and found out that in the save file for the world itself you can search the text file and manually change cargo ships to enable themselves again. In your users/"you"/appdata/roaming/space engineers folder there is a storage file that has your saves in it. Open with word or notepad and search for CARGO it should take you to the line where you can just change >false< to >true< and you will be all set. Just keep in mind that they WILL crash into planets unless you use custom cargo ships. I have had the best luck with increased sensor range mods to detect asteroids (planets) and hitting the atmo thrust on detection to avoid collision. I went a little further and placed sensors on all sides to thrust away from the detected asteroids and have not had a crash since. Hope that helps.