personally never bothered with the BATs so cant tell if that's a better way to do it or not.

I simply fully setup the mod with my map in it, and launch using the mod launcher.

I believe some people put templates up in the workshop, which you can copy paste into your "mods" folder and modify to your liking. (if you dont have a mods folder just make one in the Soma root folder)

Then you just save your map alongside the template maps, and modify the main_init.cfg to load your map on startup instead. (note you can also load maps using the F1 debug menu).


For AI patrols and the like I could explain it to you, but it would be better if you learn how to figure things out yourself, so I recommend simply looking up how frictionalgames did it( the first encounter in upsilon_inside is a good example) both in the .hpm and .hps

Also the wiki is a really good resource, and I believe if you can figure out where to look there is a tutorial on monster encounter in there
https://wiki.frictionalgames.com/hpl3/start