Thank you so much, this is amazing , i wanted it for the same reason as you (using the Rustling mod) I think you just made a whole bunch of people really happy!!
If its not too much to ask an increase spawn or High Priority spawn version would also be great for those of us that would like to use it more as a 'full time' thing.
Or even an article with a template on the changed values so we can customise it ourselves would be great!
hey, glad to see someone else happy over this because I wanted this too ever since the Rustling Mod was released but I can't code to save my life, recently got back to the game and modding it in general and took some time but just happy to figured this stuff out..
I'm done adding Cows/Bulls/Oxen but I'm still planning to add goats (idk maybe sheeps too?) in the cold mountain regions and kind of satisfied with the spawns based on my test as I intended them to be scarce and for the player to randomly find them in their normal gameplay loop but the steps below should guide you if you wanted them to be abundant.
to change the Cattle as High Priority spawns:
open any of the "location".ymt and find LOST_CATTLE_1 and LOST_CATTLE_2 (this is the modelset I added for easy identification)
change the flag under a single item: <Flags>0x33740B29</Flags> to <Flags>HighPriority</Flags>
you need to do this for every LOST_CATTLE_1 and LOST_CATTLE_2 in every "location".ymt that you see in the "../scenario" directory that this mod changed, it'll still be random as they will compete with other peds but the games engine will consider them Higher Priority spawns than other Peds/Wildlife in the area
still not satisfied? proceed to the next steps if you want more Cattle spawns then
to increase Cattle spawns:
open any of the "location".ymt and find an animal you want to replace (example: ANIMALS_PRONGHORN)
change ANIMALS_PRONGHORN to either LOST_CATTLE_1 (cows, oxen, bulls) or LOST_CATTLE_2 (goats)
the more ANIMALS you change to LOST_CATTLE_1 or LOST_CATTLE_2, the higher chances of the Cattle spawning as you are replacing a previous animal's spawn point
important to change their scenario (it's just the line above of the recently line you changed) fitting of the animal (example: for LOST_CATTLE_1, use existing COW scenarios and for LOST_CATTLE_2 use existing GOAT scenarios)
as necessary change their flags in their respective item: <Flags>0x33740B29</Flags> to <Flags>HighPriority</Flags>
Profit? lol
edit: added an Article, it's basically the same as what is outlined here, you can look at the lines in the ymt anyways for comparison and hopefully you can follow the steps and understand that I'm not going to release a high prio version since my goal here also is not to break the spawn system for trains or other rare peds/wildlife/scripts in the area
Thank you so much for this, i absolutely respect the fact that you are happy with the values as they stand and i am incredibly grateful for showing us what to change if we wanted to tweak it ourselves!!
I will probably tweak it to where i can be a bit more sure of finding them in order to simulate something close to if for example it would be a AMJM job option that you take, and pair it with bandit ambushes from Bandit Hideouts to make the roads a bit more dangerous, as i think it can create a fairly stable Cowboy style gameplay loop.
Not to mention that if we pair it with the Horse Rustling mod ( more price adjustment options with this version: Horse Rustlers (Updated Prices)) where we can tame and sell wild horses for better and more worth while prices than what vanilla gives us, the last thing we would need is early game Epilogue style Beechers Hope farm management and everything would be just perfect. (Unless we want to play in the actual Epilogue in which case everything is there!)
Wish there was an .ini file in the Rustling mod for us to be able to adjust the prices, because as it stands they are a bit too high in my opinion ''A cow is worth $25 while a bull or ox is worth $30, Goats and sheep are both $10'' As an alternative I switched to the Rustling Beta version of the mod where the price of a cow is worth $10 while a bull is worth $15. tested it, and it worked just fine. If anyone wishes to do the same, please keep in mind that this beta version only has Valentine as a Selling point and you can only Rustle/sell Cows and Bulls, no Goats and Sheep. Though if you don't mind not being able to herd and sell sheep and goats, you can always replace the LOST_CATTLE_2 spawns in this mod's files with LOST_CATTLE_1 to only get cattle spawning (might become overkill though) and leave the spawn edits at default for the heartlandswilderness.ymt and heartlandswilderness_coastal.ymt area so it is not that easy to find them near Valentine.
Thank you again for this and all the mods you have put out to help us get closer to the western style life simulator we hoped Rockstar would allow us to have beyond or besides the main story line campaign and hope you don't mind the long essay i wrote, i am just trying to leave any helpful information I came across for anyone interested and reading this in the future.
PS: Yes i completely understand where you are coming from, probably replacing some more of the deer spawns would be the safe way to go about it, and paired with : Syyyke's RDR2 Spawns FIX, hopefully will not cause any major issues.
Edit: Leaving this here for anyone that is interested and wants to try your mod and/or the edits as well
Did a quick test where i enabled priority spawns for all of the cattle (LOST_CATTLE_1) in the beechershope.ymt, went to the area, found two cows and delivered them to MacFarlanes Ranch and everything worked smooth.
Encountered a Train on the way and all other Ped spawns + Encounters worked perfectly fine (had the guy hunting for his meal encounter, and the guy looking for Gavin at (MacFarlanes Ranch) encounters pop up).
Quite a long read kek, but hey I appreciate your thoughts and we're probably same in the approach of this game, I mostly just use this as a free-roam western simulator nowadays living just your above normal cowboy I guess, pretty sure there's a bunch that plays the same way too.
Replacing the already existing animals shouldn't cause spawn issues since the peds/wildlife native spawn points are already there in the first place and I suppose changing some peds/spawns to HighPriority won't hurt that much anyways but I just mentioned that as a caution since most folks are aware now of the train/peds/wildlife spawn issues.
And appreciate the test results you shared here for others to know that the steps in the Article works lol. I intended the cattle to be scarce and just use the native chances since I imagine they are just animals that some ranchers lost in some way (maybe thru banditry or predator attacks or just escaped in their pens, while probably there are wild goats anyways during that era). Initially this was called Lost Cattle mod before settling to Ambient Cattle hence the LOST_CATTLE_1 or 2 in the Identifiers. As mentioned previously didn't want to upload a HighPrio version since I just want the game to handle the spawns by default, since in theory the mod just changed a bunch of pronghorn spawns to Cattle and Goat spawns so it shouldn't introduce any spawning issues or whatsoever (I also don't want to deal with users saying it broke their spawns or something lool and this is just a personal mod anyways that I decided to share too since I know some people also requested something like this to scripters).
edit: I saw you mentioned you are using Ambient Gang Mod too, when you added Ambient Cattle it probably went to the bottom of the order that's why you saw the Cattle but the Ambient Gangs won't show now due to conflict on the same file, you need to do a merge (I already uploaded the merge in the optional file)
Haha yea a long read indeed, and yes you're right i think we have a very similar approach to how we play the game, as we speak i am really slowly crawling trough chapter 2, with the occasional story mission every now and again to make it feel a bit more 'alive' probably until i get to chapter 4 and use your Disable American Fathers I mod to fully freeze there.
''I intended the cattle to be scarce and just use the native chances''
Yes i got that, that's the reason i decided to write all that extra stuff , firstly because i wanted a slightly more focused Cattle Man playstyle option (9 to 5 style) at least for a while, and the fact that you made that possible made your mod one of the Top mods for me. And secondly because i took a leaf out of another user's book where he posted on a few mods comment section a number of tips on how to make AMJM + The Jobs Mod + Other similar playstyle mods work together, and it helped me stabilise my game a lot, and i am always grateful when i find that kind of information trough the comment sections!
So most of it was not really for you anyways (thank you for not freaking out on me though, i think its the most i ever typed on nexus lol)
Weirdly enough i had both the cattle and the roaming bandits from Ambient Gangs appear, but its probably that the percentages were way off depending on what was taking priority so thank you so much for the Merge, will install it now!!
Both of you should check RDR2Start mod that removes the main quests completly from the game and lets you choose to play with either John or Arthur, just thought you 2 would like that....bb now
Hi, loved the mod, have a question though. Could you please explain how you dehashed the ymt files for the mod? I'm thinking about performing the same trick with HighPriority flag to some of the moose spawns in the game. Tired of hunting the buggers.
use YMT Unhasher, it doesn't unhash every single line but once you find the moose spawns you can just change whatever flag (I'm guessing it's NoAttraction or its equivalent hashed) it has to HighPriority and should work nonetheless
Sorry to bother, but I seem to need a bit more help. The Unhasher does unhash some of the tag names, which is usefull. It however does not unhash the tag contents for the <ScenarioType> tag for me. I can see in your files stuff like <ScenarioType>WORLD_ANIMAL_CROW_ON_PERCH</ScenarioType> - which makes the file understandable and moddable. Mine looks like <ScenarioType>0x714DCFE3</ScenarioType> in the same line.
How did you make the unhasher do that? What am I missing? Thanks for help in advance.
since you mentioned it's the same line then I suspect you didn't extract the unhasher along with it's necessary files in the zip, it needs to have those txt files in the same folder to decipher the hash..
the unhasher is your typical windows script file that can be ran thru terminal/cmd prompt or the easier way is to drag the hashed ymt txt file over the executable, it should generate a new ymt_dehashed file if you are doing it correctly..
other than that not sure how I can help you if it isn't working on your end and also this is already getting off-topic for the mod itself here
I have played with your mod for quite some time, I like it. But I think I have a bug to report. I have under no circumstances noticed any cow/goats spawn in heartlands coast. I tried making them priority spawns. I replaced EVERY poghorn spawn to goat spawn in heatlands_coastal.ymt. No goats there. The main heartlands location works fine to my knowledge.
will re-upload the heartlands_coastal.ymt file (forgot to change the UNK thing in the uploaded Files for the heartlands coastal I think)
edit: for ymt's, need to change the top and bottom lines from: UNK_TYPE to UNK_MEMBER as the models/peds will be invisible if this isn't done, this is a known OpenIV Bug
edit2: re-uploaded the mod with the said ymt corrected (rest of the files wasn't modified)
hello, if you are just using the normal Cowgirls Revisioned mod (w/out Ambient Gang merge), you can still use the "Cowgirls Revisioned (Ambient Gang) Mod Merge" in the Optional Files section (there are just lines in ambientpedmodelset that won't be used by Ambient Gang mod anyways)
Amazing mod! I also use the rustling mod and been looking for something like this for a while now as i always thought it was weird the base game not having herds of cattle out grazing on pastures and such, Props to you for taking the time to make this mod my good man :)
thank you! also surprised that no scripters/coders have created something like this, pretty sure the talented modders out there can easily churn out something like this seeing there are scripts that spawns ped in the game
increasing the number of cattle spawns to that magnitude requires creating and handpicking new additional spawn points which is against one of my goals here (if you managed to read the long comment thread here, one of my goals for this mod is not to be a factor on the dreaded ped/trains/wildlife spawning issue so I only replaced and not added some of the animal spawns as cattle, a lot of people has different modlist and adding 1 more mod could potentially break the spawn system hence when I decided to share this I didn't want it be something that contributed to the issue at hand)
you could try to use Improved Wildlife as I think it increases the flocking chances of animals
there are a lot of files in Project NA since it's a pretty huge project, haven't checked thoroughly what each of their ASI script does inside the game (although there is an article in the mod page)..
general rule for checking if LML mods are compatible with each other is to check if they edit the same file/s and if not then it's safe to install both but if they do modify the same file/s then a merge is necessary, checking if ASI scripts are conflicting with your mods is a different thing since they're usually not open source and you'll just have to test and rely what the mod author says it does..
to conclude, Project NA has both tons of ASI Scripts and LML edits at the same time so if there are no conflicting files with the mod you wanted to install, you'll have to test to see if they're compatible (in Ambient Cattle mod's case, I don't think there are conflicting files with Project NA but I couldn't test thoroughly since I already uninstalled Project NA as I was getting couple of issues from it not related to this mod)
Hey there, very interesting mod you did, you also made me discover the really cool mod of Ruslting, so thank you !
I wanted to ask, i'm using Ambient Gang, and as you said, you uploaded a merge for this mod, but the problem is... Im also using the Cowgirls Revisioned, the author of this mod also made a merge for Ambient Gang, but unfortunately, i have to choose between keeping the Cowgirls mod or using yours instead..
So, it's maybe a too painfull work to do, but i would be very glad to see a merge with the Cowgirls merge for Ambient Gang if that is possible But as i said, it's maybe to annoying to do, so i would understand if you're lazy to deal with, anyways, thanks for sharing your work !
merge for "Cowgirls Revisioned (Ambient Gang)" + "Ambient Cattle" mods has been uploaded in the Optional Files section
if you are already using the Cowgirls Revisioned merge for Ambient Gang, then only the ambientpedmodelsets.meta is required to be merged for the 3 mods to work together anyways (you still need the rest of the Main Files of Ambient Cattle Mod for the Cattle/Goats to spawn)
There's a bug I discovered, a bull is in the same fence barrier where you see the ranch owner's son in the epilogue as John helping to ride his horse, it's almost funny, the boy is riding the horse and in the middle is an angry bull running back and forth! lol
that's odd, this mod doesn't touch Pronghorn Ranch at all so not sure if this is something caused by the mod and I replayed that mission but didn't encounter any Cattle inside the same fence as Duncan
edit: tested this twice, one on a Replay Mission and another on a downloaded save just before this mission and didn't encountered any Bull inside the same fence as Duncan Geddes.. like I mentioned, this mod doesn't touch Pronghorn Ranch so likely what happened is the Bull from the adjacent Cattle fence probably got spooked out and moved to Duncan's fence when John was tiring out Jeremiah
will definitely install this when I replay the game, mainly cuz I find it anoying having to steal farm animals to get some of the outfits from the trapper. Just a quick question, do you think this will contribute to the famous "spawn bug" caused by too many textures?
Just a quick question, do you think this will contribute to the famous "spawn bug" caused by too many textures?
it shouldn't, in the first place this mod doesn't even stream/replace nor introduce new texture files (.ydd, .ytd, .ydr etc.).. also on the bottom of the mod's description page, I explained the approach on the implementation of the mod
The Cattle (player can encounter a single head or n number of heads) replaces some of the Pronghorn Spawn Points in the Locations mentioned above (no Pronghorns harmed) but not to the point that they are abundant in the wilderness. Utilizes the games native ped and wildlife spawn system hence the chances of finding the animals are at random and at the hands of the engine, no additional spawns and spawn points added in the locations (if you are already experiencing the dreaded Spawn issues due to obsolete mods/large texture streaming mods etc.. then high probability that you won't see the ambient cattle too since they're not High Priority spawns).
since both uses ambientpedmodelsets.meta, you need to merge some lines in Ambient Gangs mod, see the last lines in the said file in this mod, should be pretty straight forward (you can just add it close to the very end)
I'll add a merge in the optional file section
edit: merge for Ambient Gang mod has been added in the Optional File section
39 comments
Thank you so much, this is amazing , i wanted it for the same reason as you (using the Rustling mod)
I think you just made a whole bunch of people really happy!!
Or even an article with a template on the changed values so we can customise it ourselves would be great!
Again , thank you for the Mod!
I'm done adding Cows/Bulls/Oxen but I'm still planning to add goats (idk maybe sheeps too?) in the cold mountain regions and kind of satisfied with the spawns based on my test as I intended them to be scarce and for the player to randomly find them in their normal gameplay loop but the steps below should guide you if you wanted them to be abundant.
to change the Cattle as High Priority spawns:
to increase Cattle spawns:
edit: added an Article, it's basically the same as what is outlined here, you can look at the lines in the ymt anyways for comparison and hopefully you can follow the steps and understand that I'm not going to release a high prio version since my goal here also is not to break the spawn system for trains or other rare peds/wildlife/scripts in the area
I will probably tweak it to where i can be a bit more sure of finding them in order to simulate something close to if for example it would be a AMJM job option that you take, and pair it with bandit ambushes from Bandit Hideouts to make the roads a bit more dangerous, as i think it can create a fairly stable Cowboy style gameplay loop.
Not to mention that if we pair it with the Horse Rustling mod ( more price adjustment options with this version: Horse Rustlers (Updated Prices)) where we can tame and sell wild horses for better and more worth while prices than what vanilla gives us, the last thing we would need is early game Epilogue style Beechers Hope farm management and everything would be just perfect. (Unless we want to play in the actual Epilogue in which case everything is there!)
Wish there was an .ini file in the Rustling mod for us to be able to adjust the prices, because as it stands they are a bit too high in my opinion ''A cow is worth $25 while a bull or ox is worth $30, Goats and sheep are both $10''
As an alternative I switched to the Rustling Beta version of the mod where the price of a cow is worth $10 while a bull is worth $15. tested it, and it worked just fine.
If anyone wishes to do the same, please keep in mind that this beta version only has Valentine as a Selling point and you can only Rustle/sell Cows and Bulls, no Goats and Sheep.
Though if you don't mind not being able to herd and sell sheep and goats, you can always replace the LOST_CATTLE_2 spawns in this mod's files with LOST_CATTLE_1 to only get cattle spawning (might become overkill though) and leave the spawn edits at default for the heartlandswilderness.ymt and heartlandswilderness_coastal.ymt area so it is not that easy to find them near Valentine.
Thank you again for this and all the mods you have put out to help us get closer to the western style life simulator we hoped Rockstar would allow us to have beyond or besides the main story line campaign and hope you don't mind the long essay i wrote, i am just trying to leave any helpful information I came across for anyone interested and reading this in the future.
PS: Yes i completely understand where you are coming from, probably replacing some more of the deer spawns would be the safe way to go about it, and paired with : Syyyke's RDR2 Spawns FIX, hopefully will not cause any major issues.
Edit: Leaving this here for anyone that is interested and wants to try your mod and/or the edits as well
Did a quick test where i enabled priority spawns for all of the cattle (LOST_CATTLE_1) in the beechershope.ymt, went to the area, found two cows and delivered them to MacFarlanes Ranch and everything worked smooth.
Encountered a Train on the way and all other Ped spawns + Encounters worked perfectly fine (had the guy hunting for his meal encounter, and the guy looking for Gavin at (MacFarlanes Ranch) encounters pop up).
I am using Ambient Gangs + Bandit Hideouts (which add to the ped spawn pool) and it seems fine.
I am also using Syyyke's RDR2 Spawns FIX mod so that probably helps.
Replacing the already existing animals shouldn't cause spawn issues since the peds/wildlife native spawn points are already there in the first place and I suppose changing some peds/spawns to HighPriority won't hurt that much anyways but I just mentioned that as a caution since most folks are aware now of the train/peds/wildlife spawn issues.
And appreciate the test results you shared here for others to know that the steps in the Article works lol. I intended the cattle to be scarce and just use the native chances since I imagine they are just animals that some ranchers lost in some way (maybe thru banditry or predator attacks or just escaped in their pens, while probably there are wild goats anyways during that era). Initially this was called Lost Cattle mod before settling to Ambient Cattle hence the LOST_CATTLE_1 or 2 in the Identifiers. As mentioned previously didn't want to upload a HighPrio version since I just want the game to handle the spawns by default, since in theory the mod just changed a bunch of pronghorn spawns to Cattle and Goat spawns so it shouldn't introduce any spawning issues or whatsoever (I also don't want to deal with users saying it broke their spawns or something lool and this is just a personal mod anyways that I decided to share too since I know some people also requested something like this to scripters).
edit: I saw you mentioned you are using Ambient Gang Mod too, when you added Ambient Cattle it probably went to the bottom of the order that's why you saw the Cattle but the Ambient Gangs won't show now due to conflict on the same file, you need to do a merge (I already uploaded the merge in the optional file)
''I intended the cattle to be scarce and just use the native chances''
Yes i got that, that's the reason i decided to write all that extra stuff , firstly because i wanted a slightly more focused Cattle Man playstyle option (9 to 5 style) at least for a while, and the fact that you made that possible made your mod one of the Top mods for me.
And secondly because i took a leaf out of another user's book where he posted on a few mods comment section a number of tips on how to make AMJM + The Jobs Mod + Other similar playstyle mods work together, and it helped me stabilise my game a lot, and i am always grateful when i find that kind of information trough the comment sections!
So most of it was not really for you anyways (thank you for not freaking out on me though, i think its the most i ever typed on nexus lol)
Weirdly enough i had both the cattle and the roaming bandits from Ambient Gangs appear, but its probably that the percentages were way off depending on what was taking priority so thank you so much for the Merge, will install it now!!
The Unhasher does unhash some of the tag names, which is usefull. It however does not unhash the tag contents for the <ScenarioType> tag for me. I can see in your files stuff like <ScenarioType>WORLD_ANIMAL_CROW_ON_PERCH</ScenarioType> - which makes the file understandable and moddable. Mine looks like <ScenarioType>0x714DCFE3</ScenarioType> in the same line.
How did you make the unhasher do that? What am I missing? Thanks for help in advance.
the unhasher is your typical windows script file that can be ran thru terminal/cmd prompt or the easier way is to drag the hashed ymt txt file over the executable, it should generate a new ymt_dehashed file if you are doing it correctly..
other than that not sure how I can help you if it isn't working on your end and also this is already getting off-topic for the mod itself here
will re-upload the heartlands_coastal.ymt file(forgot to change the UNK thing in the uploaded Files for the heartlands coastal I think)edit: for ymt's, need to change the top and bottom lines from: UNK_TYPE to UNK_MEMBER as the models/peds will be invisible if this isn't done, this is a known OpenIV Bug
edit2: re-uploaded the mod with the said ymt corrected (rest of the files wasn't modified)
you could try to use Improved Wildlife as I think it increases the flocking chances of animals
general rule for checking if LML mods are compatible with each other is to check if they edit the same file/s and if not then it's safe to install both but if they do modify the same file/s then a merge is necessary, checking if ASI scripts are conflicting with your mods is a different thing since they're usually not open source and you'll just have to test and rely what the mod author says it does..
to conclude, Project NA has both tons of ASI Scripts and LML edits at the same time so if there are no conflicting files with the mod you wanted to install, you'll have to test to see if they're compatible (in Ambient Cattle mod's case, I don't think there are conflicting files with Project NA but I couldn't test thoroughly since I already uninstalled Project NA as I was getting couple of issues from it not related to this mod)
I wanted to ask, i'm using Ambient Gang, and as you said, you uploaded a merge for this mod, but the problem is... Im also using the Cowgirls Revisioned, the author of this mod also made a merge for Ambient Gang, but unfortunately, i have to choose between keeping the Cowgirls mod or using yours instead..
So, it's maybe a too painfull work to do, but i would be very glad to see a merge with the Cowgirls merge for Ambient Gang if that is possible
But as i said, it's maybe to annoying to do, so i would understand if you're lazy to deal with,
anyways, thanks for sharing your work !
if you are already using the Cowgirls Revisioned merge for Ambient Gang, then only the ambientpedmodelsets.meta is required to be merged for the 3 mods to work together anyways (you still need the rest of the Main Files of Ambient Cattle Mod for the Cattle/Goats to spawn)
Huge thanks !
edit: tested this twice, one on a Replay Mission and another on a downloaded save just before this mission and didn't encountered any Bull inside the same fence as Duncan Geddes.. like I mentioned, this mod doesn't touch Pronghorn Ranch so likely what happened is the Bull from the adjacent Cattle fence probably got spooked out and moved to Duncan's fence when John was tiring out Jeremiah
it shouldn't, in the first place this mod doesn't even stream/replace nor introduce new texture files (.ydd, .ytd, .ydr etc.).. also on the bottom of the mod's description page, I explained the approach on the implementation of the mod
I'll add a merge in the optional file sectionedit: merge for Ambient Gang mod has been added in the Optional File section