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.

v1.2.2, for Hytale Update 7 (0.7.x). It needs Ziggfreed's CommonLib 2.3.0 and MMO Skill Tree 1.7.1, so update all three together: with an older one installed, the server refuses to load mob scaling and names the mod to update. Numbers are still being tuned in-game and 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 >= 1.7.1 - supplies the player-power / combat-level API the scaling reads and the ability-casting API signature moves use.
• Ziggfreed's CommonLib >= 2.3.0 - the shared library this mod builds on, including the encounter framework it now reads.

The three ship together; update them together.

Targets Hytale server 0.7.x (Update 7). 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. Whoever is 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, a difficulty multiplier, affix slots, bonus XP, and a bonus loot table.
• Affixes on native Hytale effects (no client mod): Armored (resistance to physical, crushing and projectile hits), Stalwart (knockback immunity + extra health), Swift (faster movement), Vampiric (life-steal on hit), Freezing (a chilling on-hit slow), Venomous (a harder bite, on Horrific spiders only), and six elemental wards that each take less damage from one damage type, whoever deals it: Fireward, Iceward, Stormward (lightning), Waterward, Spellward (arcane) and Voidward. Author your own in a content pack.
• Signature moves. A boss or rare mob can cast real MMO Skill Tree abilities, or fire native attack moves, on its own schedule - each with an optional wind-up animation so the hit telegraphs. Authored per role in a small file; a content pack can arm any mob the same way. One example ships switched off: turned on, it has the Ember Dragon cast Fireball and throw ice at you. The Extension packs section below says how.
• Deterministic rolls: a mob's rarity and affixes are seeded from its identity, so the same mob reproduces identically across chunk reloads with 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).
• Ready-made 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). Hytale has no names for its biomes, so the card leaves them off unless you add your own.
• 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, each with a line on what the affix does. 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). The subcommand comes first; any extra values are passed by NAME (e.g. --hudTarget=zone), not by position:

Every change made in /mobscaling ui or via the hud / preset subcommands is SAVED to mods/MmoMobScaling/mob-scaling.json and applied live to all players (no restart needed, except toggling the master enable).

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 and the point it is measured from, the difficulty-to-stats curve and its safety clamps, 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. The curve is a toughness slope, a damage curve and two ceilings: how much longer a mob takes to kill per point of difficulty (and how much of that shows as health rather than quiet damage reduction), and how much harder it hits as difficulty rises, as a scale and a shape (the shape bends the damage curve so it climbs gently at low difficulty and steeply at high; 1.0 makes it a straight line), each axis with a rail well above the top of the scale so the rarity ladder keeps its shape up there.
• 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). To retune one on your server, drop a file with the same name into mods/MmoMobScaling/difficulty/ holding just the Floor you want; it keeps the shipped target. A file with a new name needs all three keys. Delete yours to get the shipped floor back.
• Rarities and affixes are one file each (roll weight, difficulty band, the tier's difficulty multiplier, loot and XP multipliers, affix slots, the native effect, bonus drop table, display color, and the inspector icon). A tier's strength is one number: a Legendary is folded at its multiplier times the spot's difficulty, so it stays the same step above a plain mob wherever it spawns.
• Per-world control: one file per world. Drop a file in mods/MmoMobScaling/worlds/ (or ship Server/MmoMobScaling/Worlds/*.json in a pack): a Match pattern (exact, a Prefix_*, or *, so suffixed instance worlds are caught) plus just the settings that world changes. A world can switch scaling off entirely (Enabled: false), set its own baseline difficulty floor, rarity chance, caps, escalation, stat curve and clamps, the whole group-scaling behavior (how nearby players' power folds and how big a region is), place or hide the two HUD overlays, and gate its spawn Pool (allow/deny rarities, variants, and affixes, scale variant chance, extra affix slots). A file may name a "Parent" file and inherit everything it does not set; anything still unset falls back to the global settings. A file in worlds/ with the same name as a shipped one replaces it; deleting yours brings the shipped one back. Three Dungeon of Fear instances plus the Kweebec Nightmare worlds ship pre-tuned via a shared parent base. (A pre-1.0.2 inline WorldOverrides list migrates to files automatically on first start.)

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

Where the files live

All owner files are created under mods/MmoMobScaling/, relative to the folder your server runs from (its working directory), not next to the jar. They are generated on first start, and the server log prints the absolute paths on every start, so search the log for mob-scaling config: if you cannot find them.

Extension packs

A content pack that authors mob-scaling content must declare this mod as a dependency. Without it, Hytale loads your pack in an earlier wave than the mod, the mod's own defaults are applied on top, and every one of your overrides is silently discarded with no error anywhere.

A minimal manifest.json, which must sit at the root of the zip (no wrapper folder, or the pack is skipped entirely):

{
  "Group": "YourName",
  "Name": "YourPack",
  "Version": "1.0.0",
  "ServerVersion": ">=0.7.0-pre.0 <0.8.0",
  "IncludesAssetPack": true,
  "Dependencies": { "Ziggfreed:MmoMobScaling": ">=1.1.0" }
}

Things worth knowing before you ship a pack:

• The id is exactly Ziggfreed:MmoMobScaling and it is case-sensitive. Ziggfreed:MMOMobScaling or a bare MmoMobScaling does not resolve, and an unresolved dependency aborts the server's ENTIRE asset load (see Troubleshooting below). The version RANGE is not enforced, only the id.
• With scaling switched off in mob-scaling.json, the mod registers no asset stores at all, so everything under your pack's Server/MmoMobScaling/ is ignored. That is not a pack bug.
• On every start, this mod audits the loaded packs and logs a line naming any pack whose mob-scaling content is being shadowed, plus the exact dependency line to add. A correctly layered pack gets a confirmation line instead. It also lists any rarity, variant, affix, or caster roster that points at an effect, drop list, NPC group, role, or interaction id that does not exist, so a typo shows up at start instead of the first time a mob happens to spawn. These are warnings only and never stop the server.
• Server/NPC/Groups/Mmoscaling_Bosses.json and Mmoscaling_Excluded.json are overridable the same way. An override replaces the mod's IncludeRoles list wholesale, it does not merge into it, so copy the shipped list first if you want to keep it. Entries are NPC role ids (glob patterns allowed), not display names, and a role id that does not exist is a harmless warning in the log, never an error.
• The one caster roster the mod ships, Server/MmoMobScaling/CasterRosters/Demo_Boss_Caster.json, is an example and starts switched off. To turn it on, save demo_boss_caster.json holding {"Enabled": true} in your server's mods/MmoMobScaling/casters/ folder; it keeps the shipped file's role and spells, and no pack is needed. A pack can do the same: copy the file out of the mod's jar (a jar is a zip) into your pack at the same path and set "Enabled": true; your copy replaces the shipped one. Any roster switches off the same way with "Enabled": false, and a mob it would have armed falls to any other roster that matches it. A file in the casters folder with a new name adds a roster of your own.

Troubleshooting

The server dies with IllegalStateException: Missing default DamageCause assets. No asset pack loaded at all, which means the pack sort failed before anything was read. Scroll UP in the log for Failed to calculate asset pack load order and Missing required dependencies, and fix the offending Dependencies id in that pack's manifest.json (usually a case or spelling mistake, see above). This crash is not caused by a bad id inside a rarity or affix file: a dangling EffectId or drop list only warns and no-ops.

A content pack's changes do nothing. Check the start-up log for the pack audit line described above. The usual causes are a missing Ziggfreed:MmoMobScaling dependency, a manifest.json that is not at the zip root, or scaling being disabled.

I cannot find the config. It is created relative to the server's working directory. The absolute path is printed on every start; search the log for mob-scaling config:.

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 first, from the server console to sweep every loaded world or in each world as a player (it works even when scaling is disabled), then remove the jar.

Installation

1. Install MMO Skill Tree >= 1.7.1 and Ziggfreed's CommonLib >= 2.3.0.
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) falls back to a distance-and-proximity grid with the world's baseline floor.

Scripted boss fights. A boss (and its adds) raised by a Hytale encounter script, or bound to a live encounter through Ziggfreed's CommonLib, is left alone: no rarity, no affixes, no health modifier from this mod. The fight owns its own health, scaled per party member and per power point by the encounter framework, and this mod feeds that framework the power of the region the boss stands in. The Mmoscaling_Bosses group is for the world's own roaming bosses; an encounter boss listed there changes nothing. A freshly spawned mob is rolled on the first tick after it appears, so it stands at its base health for that one tick before its scaled maximum lands.

Third-party nameplate mods. The rarity and variant decoration is written to a mob's display name, the value Hytale uses for logs and kill feeds, as a localized message so each player reads it in their own language. It is not the overhead nameplate, which this mod never touches. A mod that adds its own overhead nameplate and copies the display name into it can flatten that localized message and print the raw template (something like {rarity} {base}) instead of the finished text. That comes from the other mod, and nothing can be changed here to fix it. The Mob Inspector overlay always shows the correct rarity, variant, and affixes: look at the mob and read the crosshair card.

Links & Support

• Companion mod: MMO Skill Tree
• Patch notes for every version: patch-notes/
• Website: wintergreen-solutions.com