MMO Mob Scaling

Open-world mobs that scale to the players around them. A high-power group meets tougher, rarer, affixed enemies; a lone newcomer is never overwhelmed. A standalone companion to the MMO Skill Tree mod that turns Hytale's open world into a living difficulty curve, zone by zone, without you hand-placing a single spawn.

v1.0.0 - first release. The full scaling system is in. It is still in active in-game tuning, so numbers may shift between builds. Everything is data-driven, so you can retune any of it.

Requirements

Both load before this mod (drop all three jars in your server Mods/ folder):

• MMO Skill Tree >= 1.5.0 - supplies the player-power / combat-level API the scaling reads.
• Ziggfreed's CommonLib >= 1.2.0 - the shared primitive library this mod builds on.

Targets Hytale server 0.5.x (Update 5). Zero client install: everything is server-side.

What it does

Every hostile open-world mob, as it spawns, is scaled to a difficulty resolved from three layers:

1. Native zone + biome floors. Each of Hytale's own worldgen zones carries a baseline difficulty (a gentle starter gradient ships out of the box, Zone 0 through Zone 4). The deeper the zone, the harder its mobs. You retune one small file per zone or biome; no zone registry to invent.
2. Distance-from-spawn escalation. Past a configurable radius, every stretch of blocks adds difficulty AND raises the chance of rare, affixed mobs, so the deep frontier is deadly in every zone. A lone traveler far from home should feel it.
3. The players actually there. A region's difficulty tracks the real power of the group standing in it (their full MMO Skill Tree build: combat, stat rewards, abilities, mastery, achievements), not just the highest level present. Roll up with a strong party and the zone answers.

The tougher a mob, the better it pays: a scaled kill grants bonus MMO XP (with an underdog bonus for punching above your weight) and pulls extra loot from a per-rarity drop table.

Features

• Rarity ladder. Rare, Epic, Legendary, plus a forced Boss tier for tagged mobs. Each tier is a colored nameplate, a body-tint aura, stat multipliers, affix slots, bonus XP, and a bonus loot table.
• Affixes on native Hytale effects (no client mod): Armored (damage resistance), Stalwart (knockback immunity + extra health), Swift (faster movement), Vampiric (life-steal on hit), and Freezing (a chilling on-hit slow). Author your own in a content pack.
• Deterministic rolls. A mob's rarity and affixes are seeded from its identity, so the same mob reproduces identically across chunk reloads (no reroll churn).
• Native-first everywhere. Difficulty rides Hytale's own worldgen zones, effects, NPC-group tagsets, and item-drop lists, so your existing world and other mods keep working.
• Two player HUD overlays (see below).
• Presets + full data control. Ship-ready presets and per-file tuning for everything.

HUD overlays

Two lightweight, per-player, always-current overlays (both toggle on or off and reposition live):

• Zone Difficulty card. The local spawn difficulty, a threat tier read RELATIVE to you (Trivial through Deadly, colored), your own power, the tracked group power, and the friendly location name (the zone shows its real in-game name, e.g. "Cinder Wastes", not an internal id; the biome is shown alongside).
• Mob Inspector card. Look at any mob and see a portrait of it, its name, rarity tag, scaled difficulty, a live health bar, and its affixes as icon chips. Affix icons are data-driven (an item id or a texture), so a content pack can theme them.

Commands

/mobscaling <subcommand> (requires the hytale:Admin role, or OP when permissions are off):

Live HUD and preset changes are runtime-only; the config file is the persistent authority.

Configuration

Everything is a proper Hytale asset (owner-overridable, pack-extendable), under mods/MmoMobScaling/ and the mod's asset stores. You never edit Java.

• Presets. Set ActivePreset (or use /mobscaling preset) to Default (balanced), Casual (gentler curve, rarer specials), Hardcore (harsher, denser), or Playtest (steep ramp from spawn, for testing). Presets are partial overlays; anything you do not set inherits the default.
• mods/MmoMobScaling/mob-scaling.json overrides any settings key (master enable, rarity chance, difficulty caps, the distance-escalation curve, the difficulty-to-stats curve, group-power aggregation, and both HUD overlays incl. the zone/biome name-key prefixes and the inspector portrait toggle). Only your changes are stored; a partial nested group inherits the rest.
• Zone / biome floors are one small file each under the mod's Difficulty/ assets (TargetType Zone or Biome, the native name or a * wildcard, and a Floor).
• Rarities and affixes are one file each (roll weight, difficulty band, multipliers, affix slots, the native effect, bonus drop table, display color, and the inspector icon).
• Per-world control. MMO Skill Tree's per-world rules can disable scaling or set a difficulty floor for an individual world.

Content packs can add or replace rarities, affixes, zone floors, and drop tables; the fold order is mod defaults < content pack < server owner.

Uninstall note

While the mod is enabled it reconciles scaled mobs every time they load, so a retune or a removal is picked up cleanly. A fully removed mod cannot self-heal saved mobs, so for a clean uninstall run /mobscaling purge in each world first (that command works even when scaling is disabled), then remove the jar.

Installation

1. Install MMO Skill Tree >= 1.5.0 and Ziggfreed's CommonLib >= 1.2.0.
2. Drop MmoMobScaling-<version>.jar in your server's Mods/ folder.
3. Start the server. Scaling is on by default with the balanced preset; tune from mods/MmoMobScaling/.

Compatibility

Native-asset-first by design: scaling rides Hytale's own worldgen, effects, NPC groups, and drop lists, so it coexists with other content mods. A world using a non-standard worldgen (flat/void/custom) simply falls back to a distance-and-proximity grid with the world's baseline floor.

Links & Support

• Companion mod: MMO Skill Tree
• Full developer changelog: CHANGELOG.md
• Website: wintergreen-solutions.com