 
The very first quest, the very first person you speak with describes a world of horrible creatures ready to hunt you down. You are to believe everyone else is dead and gone minus a few stragglers. Meanwhile a fluffball of a MoNstEr walks by and a gentle giant down the road maintains the forest. The wilds should be dangerous. In vanilla Palworld most wild Pals ignore you or flee, so you wander the world unbothered. Predators & Stealth flips that: nearly every wild Pal now hunts you. A small curated list of docile species (Lamball,
Cattiva, Chikipi and friends) stays passive, the world is hostile, with a few gentle exceptions.
 
But being hunted isn't the whole story, stealth actually works:
 
- They see you. Sight has a real vision cone and true line of sight (no seeing through walls). Get behind cover or out of their cone and you're unseen.
- They hear you. Move around and nearby Pals hear you and turn to look, from any direction, even through walls. Sharp-eared species (bats, canines, birds) hear you from much farther; heavy, deaf ones only up close.
- Crouch to go silent. Crouching cuts your noise to nothing, so a Pal won't hear you, only see you. Crouch-sneak behind a Pal and past it; walk upright and it'll hear you coming.
- Hide to escape. Once something is chasing you, break its line of sight and put distance between you, and after a few seconds it loses the trail and gives up. Crouching makes it give up sooner.
 
I plan to slowly adjust various Pals ranges (if I ever get to actually play and stop building this mod) so more and more Pal's perceptions make more sense. 
 
Your own Pals are never turned against you.
 
How it's built (and why it's light): v2.0.0 drives all the aggression and
detection through Palworld's native AI as a **data patch**, no constant
background scanning, so there's no traversal stutter and it's friendly to lower-end
machines. A tiny companion script adds the one thing the data can't: giving up the
chase when you break line of sight.
 
Note, no level-scaled aggro (yet). v1 made higher-level Pals notice you from
farther. Doing that properly means checking every nearby Pal's level against yours
many times a second, which is exactly the background scanning that caused v1's
stutter, and a Pal's sight range is fixed per species, not a per-Pal value we can
nudge on the fly. So true level-based awareness can't be done without bringing the
lag back, and it's **left out for now** in favor of a smooth, hostile world. It may
return later as an optional add-on.
 
## Requirements
- **UE4SS** (RE-UE4SS) for Palworld.
- **PalSchema** (by Oak), **required.** The aggression/detection is a PalSchema
  data patch. Install PalSchema first: https://www.nexusmods.com/palworld (search
  "PalSchema") or its Steam Workshop page.
- Single-player / client (host-and-play). Dedicated servers untested.
 
## Installation
1. Install **UE4SS** and **PalSchema** for Palworld if you haven't.
2. **Extract this zip into your UE4SS `Mods` folder.** It drops in two things:
   - `Mods\PredatorStealth\`, the mod itself (the hide-to-escape script).
   - `Mods\PalSchema\mods\PredatorStealth\`, the aggression data patch (merges
     into your existing PalSchema install; it won't touch PalSchema's own files).
3. Enable the mod: the included `enabled.txt` auto-enables it on standard RE-UE4SS;
   on the Steam-Workshop UE4SS build add `PredatorStealth : 1` to `Mods\mods.txt`.
4. Launch the game. (Fully restart after any edit to the data patch.)
 
## Customizing which Pals are hostile / how they sense you
Everything lives in **`PalSchema\mods\PredatorStealth\raw\aggressive.jsonc`**,
one line per Pal, editable in any text editor:
- **Make a Pal passive:** delete its line (it reverts to vanilla), or set its
  `AIResponse` to `Friendly`.
- **Make a passive Pal hostile:** add a line for it with `AIResponse: Warlike`.
- **Aggro range:** `ViewingDistance` (metres), how far it can *see* you.
- **Hearing range:** `HearingRate` (metres), how far it *hears* you (crouch
  silences you regardless). Bump it for sharp-eared species, drop it for deaf ones.
- The file header lists every option, and each line is tagged with its category.
 
The "prey" that stay passive are simply the species **not** in that file (Lamball,
Cattiva, Chikipi, Vixy, Melpaca, Pengullet, and friends).
 
Hide-to-escape timing is in `PredatorStealth\Scripts\main.lua` (`CONFIG` block):
`hide_seconds`, `hide_min_distance_m`, `hide_crouch_mult`.
 
## Compatibility
- PC (Steam) build with UE4SS + PalSchema. **Does not work** on the Xbox /
  Microsoft Store (Game Pass) version or consoles.
- Don't run it alongside "all Pals hostile" pak mods, they fight over the same
  data and defeat the curation/stealth.
- Plays nice with other UE4SS Lua and PalSchema mods.
 
## Credits
Created by Xidorian. Aggression/detection via **PalSchema** (Oak).
Predators and Stealth
