I started a new game and all was going well. I started playing again after years and after some hefty vanilla gaming. I wanted to play again with mods.

I carefully selected a few and then ended up stripping that down further including VRO which appears extremely prone to breaking stuff.

What I had left were...

The 4X faction enhancer mods, Raibu alternate look (the male one), ROR, Faster Crew Leveling, Seminars (fewer), Sector Patrol/Explorer, Sanity - Sector Miner, Ship Variation Expansion, SN support APIs, The Ancients, XL Mining Ships.

Perhaps it's the latter I'm not sure (one of two that were very old). Anyway some massive nonsense occurred in my new start a moderate bit in as Terran Start.

Everything was going well. I did a few missions in passing to get a moderate balance and some upgrades on the Kukri. Went South across PIO to the ring. Went around long range scanning as I did and hit criminal traiffic to be dockable with Argon/Paranid fast.

So then it was on to claiming the free ships. I first flew to Silent Witness to grab the perseus for a good balanced fast ship for the rest.

That's when things started to get nuts. I kept flying toward where it was but nothing. SCA base almost where it should be then not far west of that a hive surprisingly close with the defence placements spread quite far.

I started really getting annoyed. I wasn't sure if I got it wrong, got screwed by the RNG or a mod messed things up. I looked at the screenshot online for the position and actually counted the cells to work out where it was meant to be.

I quick saved going into the sector. Heading toward it I would constantly get jumped and other things then just reload but could not find it. Then suddenly it's just there right where it's supposed to be and dead in the middle of my path so I had it right all along.

I was confused, did I just miss it? No notification of finding something out there and I never noticed it before but often noticed the blue wrecks.

Then it gets really weird. Before I noticed it I flew particularly far out. I noticed a bunch of FRF, maybe five in two groups close together or miners or something. What the hell. Why are they here? It's after that I noticed the ship then after setting navigation toward it I noticed on the map a bunch of FRF boarding pods seemingly slowly going in its direction half way between us from a stupid distance away. Perhaps somehow they had been claiming the ship or something else which is why it wasn't there until this reload, RNG and all.

There boarding pods were still very far so I just went and cleared up the signal on the fighter to claim it then got in. However I was still shocked in disbelief. The AI launching boarding pods? What the hell? And I could swear they were heading at the fighter so I just moved up in their path in front of them to see what would happen.

They latched on to my ship like those pods in Andromeda or flees and then just nothing. I'm just flying around with these flees stuck to me but nothing comes of it.

The question here is has anyone else had issues with a mod enabling the AI to board ships, derelict ones and if they know which one it is? It would be nice to narrow down the source of this utter madness.