Can random encounters be disabled?

golingarf

They're very annoying and all right-thinking people would rather do away with them. (Especially after the second or third time losing a level 1 or 2 mage to a horde of bandits before you can even hit the pause button - not that the droves of monsters that individually walk up and ask you to kill them aren't annoying in their own way too.)

Does anybody know what controls the random encounter probability? Could it just be set to zero?

Shin

Rest spawns are controlled by the .ARE file for each area with a percentage. You'd have to set the percentages to 0 for each area to disable those.
Random spawns on area transitioning are controlled by area scripts and various time or story-based global conditions. You could modify the scripts to get rid of unwanted encounters, but it's not an easy edit.

Alternatively you can try a shortcut like using C:SetGlobalTimer("RandomSpawn","MYAREA",FOUR_HOURS) before you transition - this is a global that area scripts often set when you do get random spawns, ensuring you won't get another one until the timer is up - at least in BG1.

The easiest way though is likely to just use Ctrl+Y to kill off random spawns that you would rather didn't happen at a particular time.

golingarf

Thanks for the info. I guess I'll have to decide between Ctrl+Y and just not using NPC mages before level 4. The latter is probably more respectable.

prophet1

Shin said:

Random spawns on area transitioning are controlled by area scripts and various time or story-based global conditions. You could modify the scripts to get rid of unwanted encounters, but it's not an easy edit.

Actually the probabilities and area references for those are set in the .WMP file, unless something changed rather drastically in the EEs that I missed. It would require either a WeiDU patch or manual editing of the worldmap file to remove those (set probabilities for every link to 0).