Subscribe to download
Animal Commonality Tweaker

It’s a tool for tweaking the wild animal commonality value, and the biome animal density. Access in settings.

Commonality changes how many of a wild animals will spawn in a biome. Alpacas have a commonality of 0.5 in Temperate Forest, so you'll get a lot of them. It's only 0.1 in Volcano, so they will exist but be fewer in number. In Desert it's zero, so they never spawn wild.

Animal density changes the maximum number of all wild animals that will spawn in a biome. So for example Tropical Swamp has a value of 6.5, where Ice Sheet has a value of 0.2. So there are a lot more animals in the swamp than on the ice.

ACT goes at the very end of the mod list, and overwrites the values that the mods provide.


For whatever reason you want 😊 I wanted it because I didn’t see my favourite animal in the wild at all in my last two playthroughs and wanted to.

Maybe you want to roleplay as having landed on world populated by only dinosaurs and ancient giant megafauna.

Or you want to play on a mod biome, but your mod animals don’t spawn on it and you’re stuck with just vanilla animals.

Perhaps there’s a really fun wild animal from a mod, but it spawns in such large numbers your colonies keep getting wiped.

Maybe your colony is the business and you want to test it at the hands of many, many dragons.

Or maybe you just really hate Donkeys.

***

This is a first alpha and my first mod, so I’m sure there’s mistakes and funny bits with some mods. Let me know please so I can sort them.

Any other comments also welcome!

With thanks to StarlightSovereign for the thumbnail art.

ACT should be at the very end of the mod list.


All the controls in the "Adjust all visible" section are modifying the ACT database, which you can view in the table on the right. It's stored in the ACT settings file in the settings folder as XML data.

Reset: resets the scale and shift adjusters
Apply: applies the scale and shift adjusters to the visible data, and then resets the adjusters to 0.

Set to def: sets the values for the visible data back to the mod/core setting, i.e. it removes the ACT adjustment.
Delete all: removes ALL ACT adjustments, and deletes the database. This may be a solution if there are technical failures. A turn it off and back on again button. It will require rim to be restarted and all the adjustments to be re-entered.
Clean: cleans the ACT database. If there are values in the ACT database for mods that have been removed, this will remove those entries. It won't remove values for loaded mods and core.

Use ACT data: unticking this box will mean the ACT database is not applied, and the original mod/core values will remain. Requires a restart.
Undo last: undo the last change to visible data, even if the visible list has been re-filtered.
Redo last: redo the undone last change to visible data.

The undo memory is only for the last change, so if you make two changes and want to undo the first one, you'll have to do it manually.

Other mods files are not effected, but when ACT loads it overwrites mod file's commonality settings in live. But the other mods files still have that data in there, and you can see the def = default value in the table. I've kept it separate for integrity and control.

Note that other mods are doing a lot more fiddling around with other mods and core values than I for one would have expected. So the def value is the value that the game has loaded at the point that ACT is loaded, which should be at the end. This happens for co-ordination between mods, e.g. for alpha animals and Bastyon, for biome mods adding things, and for mods reducing core animals. What goes in the def is different depending on which content mod is loaded last, if they are doing this.

It's why I made the mod; I had one mod completely taking over, as much as I liked the animals. I wanted to dial it down a bit. And one of the animals was bugged, so I wanted rid of that. And I had a couple of others which are great, but very rare animals, so I wanted to see them more.

If the mods have changed, either by adding/removing them, then the def value will remain as it was unless the delete all button is used and the ACT data is re-entered.

When the ACT data is changed, it doesn't load in until Rimworld is restarted. It's loaded via an XML process which is safer and more stable than just amending the in game files directly, and is considered best practise. Although obviously it's more of a faff for the player.


This only changes wild spawn rates. Not manhunter events, not animals that come with enemies, animals with traders, or anything else. If all the possible animals need a minimum temperature of 20 degrees and your map is at -50 degrees, they won't spawn whatever the commonality.

It’s designed to allow you to adjust values, so it’s obviously possible to change things that mod creators have created. Hopefully it will help to co-ordinate all that good creative stuff rather than hinder it, and enable greater enjoyment. There's some amazing mods for biomes and animals out there.

If you put crazy numbers in, things will go crazy. Maybe that’s what you want 😊This tool does give you the power to cause carnage. The biggest vanilla value for the Animal Density is 6.5, and the biggest animal commonality is 2.0.

With all the mods out there, there’s lots of different ways of writing them, so there are some wrinkles. Some biomes share commonalities, Biomes! Islands is one. So if you put in a value for Sardines for Tropical Archipelago and Tropical Island say, it will only pick up the last one in the list for both.

Some mods kill certain animal types on generation. No doubt others do funny stuff I haven't noticed.

Lots of biomes and animals mods have some controls within them on the settings page.

Lots of mods change the value of the commonality for core and other mods themselves. Some dramatically. Generally, if you put ACT at the bottom of the mod list it will overwrite others when you change a value. If you put it at the top, it will keep the values that the other mods pick.

***ACT will only overwrite values if you change them from the shown default value.

Hopefully what the controls do is clear. Clicking on the column titles sorts the animals. You can see what is live with the "Live" value. I was surprised by how much mods fiddle around with other data, even the animal density for core.

If you unclick “Use ACT Data” it will save the data but not implement it. So you can flip between adjusted and "vanilla", or use ACT just for info.

If you remove mods, data will stay in the table , but won't cause game problems or errors. If you click clean, it will remove the mods that are no longer live. You can see all this with the live value in the tables.

If you want to share values between friends, copying and sending the settings file will work.