Middle-earth Spawn Balance

v1.3.0 - The deeps

Middle-earth's underworld had trolls and spiders in it and not one person. This release puts the peoples back under the mountains, and gives depth a meaning.

Nobody was down there

• Arrivals now find standing room near your own level. Wanderers were placed by the height of the terrain column, which is the surface - so a player three hundred blocks down had their arrivals generated on the mountainside above their head. Underground, room is searched for outward from your own height instead, and the search range is a setting. At a cave mouth it still falls back to the surface, so the road outside stays walked.
• A band no longer gets flung out of its tunnel. Group scatter was measured against the surface too, so the escort of an underground arrival could land on the hillside above it.

Depth means something

• Four bands, and every one of them is config. Wild goblins scavenge near the light; the tribes of the Misty Mountains hold the delvings under them; Moria the deeps; and below even that, Moria's chiefs alongside Gundabad. The base mod has the peoples written for every one of those layers - Moria fields seven ranks, Goblin Town five, Gundabad seven - and its cave tables offered wild goblins and nothing else, at any depth, in any land. A tunnel from daylight to bedrock met the same five ranks the whole way.
• A dangerous land is worse underground than a safe one. Peril per land multiplies both how far up the ranks a depth reaches and how large a band comes, so Moria at fifty down is not the Blue Mountains at fifty down.
• Rank is read from the data, not from a list of names. Every npc type carries its own gear, and what that gear is worth is a complete power ordering written by whoever balanced it - from a thug or a snaga up to a chief or a lord. A hand-written list of ranks would have missed eorling_marshal, warden_of_the_glade and egladil_commander, and would miss anything a datapack adds. Set the bias to zero and the draw is flat and exactly as it was before.

Above ground

• Nothing changed. The biome tables keep every word of their say on the surface; all of this applies only below it, and switches off whole.

Built for Minecraft 1.21.8 · Fabric · requires Fabric API and Middle-earth 1.0.1.

v1.2.0 - Room for add-ons

Nothing about spawning changed. This release is one addition: another mod can now hook into this one's screen, its command and its diagnostics, so a server operator never has to hunt for where a companion mod hid its own settings.

An extension point

• A mod can lend this one a block of settings. They appear on /mespawn gui as their own tab, answer to /mespawn set with tab completion, and are saved into and restored from named presets - without that mod writing a screen, a command or a preset format of its own. Its values are written back to its own config file; this mod never reaches into another mod's storage.
• A mod can teach /mespawn analyze and /mespawn scan to count something new. It offers a fact about an NPC - a gender, a mood, a trade - and the reports break their counts down by it, building by building as well as overall. A broken add-on cannot take the diagnostics down with it.
• With no add-on installed, nothing changes at all. Every list is empty and the mod behaves exactly as 1.1.0 did, which was checked by running 1.1.0's own survey against this build rather than assumed.

The first add-on to use it is Middle-earth Folk, which puts women among the peoples of Middle-earth. Its settings show up on this mod's screen and /mespawn analyze starts reporting how many of each building's residents are women.

Built for Minecraft 1.21.8 · Fabric · requires Fabric API and the Middle-earth mod.