Is it possible to add new wolrd-map encounters?

[Dakkons Knowing]

I know it's possible to modify existing ones (example) but is it possible to add new ones? In particular, is it possible to add new encounters that occur in only a specifc region of the map?

I'm an established modder for other games and have gone through the schema documentation for POE2 but other than that know nothing about modding tools, practices... for POE2 in particular.

Looking at the documentation, I understand how to go about changing any existing encounters but I'm not sure about adding new ones or how you would tell the game where a given encounter could trigger. Is my understanding correct that these are hard-coded limits and a mod is only capable of modifying existing encounters?

I'm more interested in working only with the types/components/structures listed in the official documentation but if there are alternative ways through scripting or engine hacking let me know - it's probably gonna be too much for my first POE2 modding project but if it's not too bad I may give it a try!

[Kvellen]

Not something I have looked into much but near as I can tell it's possible to make a new encounter by duplicating an existing encounter changing the "ID": to a new GUID and then changing the desired parameters. Getting the new encounter to spawn is certainly something a scripts could do with LaunchRandomEnounter. Though there isn't really any way to pin it to specific place on the world map unfortunately.

Closest would probably be a ScriptHook that only fires when the player is traversing the World Map which would trigger the encounter. But that

20 hours ago, Dakkons Knowing said:

I'm an established modder for other games and have gone through the schema documentation for POE2 but other than that know nothing about modding tools, practices... for POE2 in particular.

Apotheosis by Noqn, while unofficial and still pretty new, is a really great tool for modding Deadfire as it automates a lot of things (like generating new GUIDs for new gamedata and exporting only the necessary bits of code for changes to existing gamedata) and simplifies the scripting process a lot. Also there is actual interface for editing .conversationbundles and .questbundles, which aren't really covered in the official documentation.

[Dakkons Knowing]

I see that there is an "intended level" field on world encounters - does the game use that when selecting a world encounter or does it just scale appropriately to the player level once an encounter is selected? If the game will only select level-appropriate encounters then I can maybe do something with that rather than by location as I had originally imagined. Alternatively, would it be possible to use the "prerequisites" field to do something like "player level is higher than X" before an encounter can trigger?

Thanks for letting me know about duplicating encounters! If all I need to do is that and give it a new ID then it's the same as creating new ones, as far as I can tell!

I've seen Apotheosis but I think for what I'm trying to do I'd cook up a simpler, more specific tool to do the work for me. When I said I hadn't tried any tools I meant more that I didn't download it to try it out (which I'll probably do at some point) but between screenshots, my previous modding experience (even with IE games) and the data format documentation I think I have a pretty good idea of what it does.

[Kvellen]

Yup, the IsLevel conditional checks if the player has reached a certain level threshold.

Otherwise the following paragraph is going to be assumptions, Random Encounters aren't something I have looked in to much I'm afraid. EncounterLevel is likely to do with the level scaling system and probably sets enemies in the encounter to that level, and alters the encounter if the player has one of the level scaling options enabled. I believe the only way to get an encounter to trigger is with a script, but it is possible there is something that collects all Random Encounter into a list, similar to what it does for Player Voice Data.

 

Edited January 10, 2023 by Kvellen