What is it?

A mod for the video game Avorion.

How do I install it?

It's on the Steam Workshop. Else:

cd ~/.avorion/mods  # For Linux; no idea what it'd be for Windows or macOS
git clone https://github.com/YellowApple/WarZoneTweaks.git

And in either case, enable it in the in-game mod menu.

What does it do?

Fixes a rather wide variety of annoyances and even outright bugs with so-called "Hazard Zones" ("war zones" in the game code).

In particular:

• Explicitly restricts war zone score increases to the destruction of specific entity types (ships, stations, turrets, and fighters). The vanilla code looked... wonky in that regard.

• A sector defending itself against an attacker will not cause the war zone score to increase just because the defenders blew up one of the attackers. This should cut down on all those situations where Head Hunters turn player-owned sectors into war zones and scare away all the merchant ships.

• The player is no longer special; ship destruction (when eligible to increase the war zone score) will bump the score by 10 points, no matter who owned it or who blew it to smithereens.

• Turrets and fighters only contribute 5 points to the war zone score when destroyed.

• Any sector can become a war zone, even one without any stations in it (yet).

• The war zone score starts decaying after 5 minutes instead of 60 (per the comments in the mod's code: "An hour? Ain't nobody got time for that!").

• The threshold for declaring a sector to be a "Hazard Zone" is now 75 points instead of 60. To compensate for this and the shorter decay period, the threshold for clearing that status / declaring a sector to be peaceful again is now 25 points instead of 40.

What might it do in the future?

I'm just spitballing here, but here are some neat things I'd like to do that (as far as I can tell) are well within the realm of possibility (though whether or not they're possible without tanking performance is another question entirely...):

• Overhaul the hazard zones to account for the factions involved (e.g. if faction Foo has stations being visited by factions Bar and Baz, and faction Bam (who is hostile to Foo and Bar but not to Baz) comes in and starts blowing up Foo's and Bar's ships, Baz shouldn't necessarily care unless/until one of its own ships gets hit in the crossfire).

• Enforce higher minimum scores or lower maximum scores in certain situations (e.g. each hostile ship in the sector should increase the minimum score).

• Make the "Hazard Zone" designation more of a spectrum rather than an all-or-nothing proposition (e.g. inverse relationship between war zone score and the number/frequency of civil ships spawned, potentially adjusted further by the number of friendly v. hostile ships in the sector).

• Apply war zone rules to ships other than cargo ships (for example: the mobile merchants that occasionally warp in; they should probably wait until the fighting's over to warp in, and/or warp out as soon as they can if there's ongoing fighting).

• Other things, I'm sure.

Is this compatible with other mods?

It should be. I play with a lot of mods, and this doesn't seem to impact them at all (at least at the moment).

Will this break my saves?

Due to a bug (or perhaps merely an oversight on Boxelware's part), the vanilla code controlling the war zone checking loads the decay cooldown and thresholds (from what I can tell) on a per-sector basis, and has no means to override this should those values have changed for some reason (e.g. by this mod). Conversely, in order for this mod to set these values for already-generated sectors, it has to override WarZoneCheck.restore() with a version that explicitly overwrites those values (namely: noDecayTime, warZoneThreshold, pacefulThreshold [sic], and maxScore in self.data). Until/unless Boxelware fixes this (might I recommend a certain mod which implements this more robustly? ;) ) or someone (perhaps myself) adds a cleanup mod specifically for this purpose, be aware that these changes are effectively permanent for sectors loaded with this mod active.

All the other changes this mod makes happen in real-time and do not involve any modification to saved data.