modding HUGE Problem with Modding RDR2 That No One is Talking About

[Dagger323 22]

So after modding RDR2 for about five months (I first started modding it in early August 2023), it has now come to my attention that modding essentially breaks the game engine's ability to properly spawn in NPCs, wildlife, and even trains, in the way the game was intended. Trains rarely if ever spawn in, and if they do, NPCs will be nearly or completely absent from riding as passengers on the train, and the armed guard will be gone who usually stands at the back end of the caboose (only the engineer will be driving the train, but no one else will be present). NPCs will also essentially never be found riding as passengers in stagecoaches or in the back of wagons or riding shotgun next to the driver (only the driver will spawn in). In general, there will be less NPCs seen standing or sitting at train stops like Emerald Station or Wallace Station, or at various locations throughout the world. Further, wildlife is drastically reduced, with only a few birds and deer and whatnot scattered sparsely throughout the surrounding area, perhaps at about a 20 percent (or less) amount of the densely populated wildlife that is typically found in the vanilla game.

 

The only way to fix these issues is seemingly to uninstall most if not all mods to put less strain on the game engine and allow it to render in NPCs, trains, and wildlife correctly. I have had numerous mods installed from both rdr2mods as well as nexusmods, from modded quarter horse breeds/coats, to environment texture overhaul/upscales, to the Arthur Morgan Upscale Project, 4K Story and Side Characters, realistic gun metals and wickedhorseman's Firearm Cosmetics, euphoria ragdoll mods such as C.E.R.R, A.E.M and W.E.R.O, as well as PDO and fixes to decrease ped accuracy, and several others. All the mods I use regularly only require lml, scripthook and dinput8.dll, and none require version.dll or any online content unlocker, but it doesn't seem to make a difference either way - more than just a couple mods being installed at once still breaks the open world's NPCs, trains, and wildlife from spawning properly. I have had to remove almost all my horse mods, gun mods, texture mods, and combat mods like PDO in order to get the open world populated correctly again. Basically I have next to no mods that I downloaded that I can use at this point. This comes as quite a huge letdown for me, as I was really enjoying getting into modding the game how I wanted it to be. But diminishing the open world into a mere shell of what it is supposed to be is simply too immersion breaking for me to be able to ignore.

 

I don't know why more people aren't talking about this, because it is a huge problem in my eyes, but I've basically found no information about this anywhere. Who out there that is into RDR2 modding has noticed these issues? Is there any solution to this that anyone knows of? I really don't want to have to delete all my mods, but at this point, it looks like that's the only way I can get the full intended single player experience of the game without watering down the open world and sacrificing immersion.

Edited December 27, 2023 by Dagger323

[nani17 1]

I literally just got back into the game and I don't remember this being an issue. However today I noticed nothing was spawning especially trains etc like you said.  I bought a train ticket and noticed absolutely no one on the train no armed guards no passengers nothing only to driver. I have a few mods installed like unlocking online content, open interiors, lasso mod, extended contracts and maybe one or two more I'm wondering is there a set limit and how much you can have before completely breaks the game. At this point Im property going to remove ones I really don't need and keep maybe one or two and best. 

 

 

[Dagger323 22]

It really is unfortunate because I had numerous mods installed that really improved the game in a multitude of ways. I never really saw these issues before, although for the last month or so I began to notice the lack of passengers riding in stagecoaches out on the trail between towns, which I found strange. But I never put two and two together until recently. Looking back, trains had been somewhat scarce too, but I never really thought why that might be. I just figured it was the game doing its thing. This stuff must have been greatly affecting the game for a while and I just now began to pay attention and notice it. This raises the question of how many other people are unaware this is happening, and what in the world can be done about it, if anything? I've been rigorously testing different mods for the past few days and even one or two key mods like PDO and upscaling mods to Arthur can completely break the NPC and wildlife spawns. It's probably a pipe dream but I'd love it if someone could come out with some sort of mod to fix this and force the game to load all of the things it's supposed to by default so that more mods can be applied simultaneously without breaking stuff like ped spawning. I guess I just want to get more attention to this topic so that more people start discussing it. It's a huge problem and undoubtedly a complete deal breaker for many who are installing mods to try to improve their experience rather than hinder it.

Edited December 27, 2023 by Dagger323

[ShadyALT1 1]

holy hell you guys are 100% right there really are no passengers on the trains that is insane

[Dagger323 22]

24 minutes ago, ShadyALT1 said:

holy hell you guys are 100% right there really are no passengers on the trains that is insane

Check all the stagecoaches and wagons too. I bet you won't find any passengers other than the driver. Most likely you're also seeing a lot less birds in the sky and various other animals. If you temporarily disable all your mods you'll immediately see a huge increase in the amount of wildlife in the world. It's actually insane how much of a difference it makes in the ambience.

[Redfan 1]

I never experienced such issues. Sometimes peds just don't spawn because the ped limit of 150 is already reached.

[nani17 1]

I turned it on this morning and I removed a ton of mods and left only a few. I. After removing several mods I noticed trains now had passengers as well as stagecoaches. Trams also have people in them not just the drivers. I am wondering if it has anything to do with outdated/not updated mods

 

Again I don't remember this being an issue the last time I was playing the game so a possible game update could be part of the route cause along with outdated mods.  I'm not 100% sure but I'm just guessing here. Also I do notice there's been a lot less being when travelling the roads

 

 

Edited December 28, 2023 by nani17

[Dagger323 22]

1 minute ago, Redfan said:

I never experienced such issues. Sometimes peds just don't spawn because the ped limit of 150 is already reached.

Ped limit is not the issue here. The reason I know is because I installed the mod from NexusMods that increases the ped limit to 255 and nothing changed. None of the mods I'm using are increasing the number of peds spawned at one time anyway. The game is not reaching a ped limit, the engine simply can't handle too many things thrown at it at once like most texture mods and mods like PDO and will not draw certain things like trains, passengers in trains/stagecoaches/wagons, and many wildlife unless the number of mods installed are reduced, or specific mods that greatly stress the engine are simply not used. This is absolutely a huge problem that more people need to be made aware of.

[Dagger323 22]

3 minutes ago, nani17 said:

I turned it on this morning and I removed a ton of mods and left only a few. I. After removing several mods I noticed trains now had passengers as well as stagecoaches. Trams also have people in them not just the drivers. I am wondering if it has anything to do with outdated/not updated mods

 

Again I don't remember this being an issue the last time I was playing the game so a possible game update could be part of the route cause along with outdated mods.  I'm not 100% sure but I'm just guessing here. Also I do notice there's been a lot less being when travelling the roads

 

 

It's hard to say for sure but nearly all of the mods I'm using have been updated since the game's last title update (September 2022) so I doubt that's the issue. I even uninstalled all but a couple heavier mods like PDO and certain texture mods that have been updated this year, and the spawning issue persisted. I then only installed a few lighter mods that hadn't been updated since 2021 or 2022 and the spawning improved (but still wasn't completely fixed). It's very possible that most players simply didn't notice these issues but were present for quite a long time. It's very easy to get caught up in focusing on what the mods are designed to do to the game and not notice other things that they're taking away from the experience unless you know to watch for them. I had seen no-passenger stagecoaches for quite a while but never thought too much about it until the last week or so when I decided to try to check on the trains. That's what really opened my eyes to these issues.

[Dagger323 22]

I should also mention that I found this post on Reddit: 

 

So it seems that this issue has indeed been present for some time, given the date on the post.

[nani17 1]

So I wiped all mods and started from the start.

 

Rampage

Bloodlust

Bandit hideouts

BountesExpansion

Online Content Unlocker

No Bounty with Mask

SmokingComplete

 

All of these are installed and I have trains with NPC's and I've had trains pass me more than once while ingame unlike before where I could play for an hour plus and not see one

 

 

[Dagger323 22]

4 hours ago, nani17 said:

So I wiped all mods and started from the start.

 

Rampage

Bloodlust

Bandit hideouts

BountesExpansion

Online Content Unlocker

No Bounty with Mask

SmokingComplete

 

All of these are installed and I have trains with NPC's and I've had trains pass me more than once while ingame unlike before where I could play for an hour plus and not see one

 

 

Some mods don't seem to have the same constant demand on the engine that other ones do. Although sometimes the sheer amount of mods installed can still break the spawning regardless. Check the trolleys in Saint Denis, as well as the stagecoaches and wagons around towns. Even after removing mods I've had it where trains with passengers will show up but the other things I mentioned would be completely without passengers for the most part. Also, wildlife is a big one. The vanilla game has tons of birds and animals everywhere which many mods seem to mitigate considerably. 

Edited December 28, 2023 by Dagger323

[JKL409 6]

I've also just recently discovered this problem and am amazed more people in the modding community aren't discussing it. 

I've had to give up on my playthrough that I've spent 60 plus hours on at this point just because I hadn't realised how fundamentally broken the game is when having mods installed. (Even upgraded my PC especially for this game and its mods.) 

Which is a shame as I was really enjoying the challenge of having to hunt down rare animals and having to spend a long time searching them out.

Only to discover that in actual fact the base game makes them relatively easy to find, but mods break the game so much that you get the impression that it's seriously challenging and get a false sense of feeling rewarded, when in reality they aren't even spawning properly in the first place.

 

And that's not evening mentioning trains, pedestrians on trains, random events passengers on carts etc... 

 

Why the modding community refuses to acknowledge that their mods with thousands of downloads are fundamentally breaking people's games without them even realising it I don't understand... 

 

I'm surprised and disappointed also that modders aren't working on trying to understand why this issue is occurring and actively working to prevent it.

 

I'm glad at least someone other than me has managed to put this out there.

[Dagger323 22]

10 hours ago, JKL409 said:

I've also just recently discovered this problem and am amazed more people in the modding community aren't discussing it. 

I've had to give up on my playthrough that I've spent 60 plus hours on at this point just because I hadn't realised how fundamentally broken the game is when having mods installed. (Even upgraded my PC especially for this game and its mods.) 

Which is a shame as I was really enjoying the challenge of having to hunt down rare animals and having to spend a long time searching them out.

Only to discover that in actual fact the base game makes them relatively easy to find, but mods break the game so much that you get the impression that it's seriously challenging and get a false sense of feeling rewarded, when in reality they aren't even spawning properly in the first place.

 

And that's not evening mentioning trains, pedestrians on trains, random events passengers on carts etc... 

 

Why the modding community refuses to acknowledge that their mods with thousands of downloads are fundamentally breaking people's games without them even realising it I don't understand... 

 

I'm surprised and disappointed also that modders aren't working on trying to understand why this issue is occurring and actively working to prevent it.

 

I'm glad at least someone other than me has managed to put this out there.

I'm glad you posted. I was seriously expecting this thread to get a lot more attention but unfortunately it seems the community is largely ignoring the problem. After countless hours, I managed to get my game mostly working without spawning bugs, but this involved cutting out numerous significant mods that took ages to narrow down as the fault behind it. There's plenty of other mods out there too that I'm not using, and haven't used, that I'm sure are also breaking the game, but without more people reporting on this issue and keeping track of it, they aren't going to get fixed. For such a seemingly passionate modding community on the game, you'd think this issue would be a top priority for everyone. I'm still scratching my head as to why it's not.

Edited February 9 by Dagger323

[JKL409 6]

6 hours ago, Dagger323 said:

I'm glad you posted. I was seriously expecting this thread to get a lot more attention but unfortunately it seems the community is largely ignoring the problem. After countless hours, I managed to get my game mostly working without spawning bugs, but this involved cutting out numerous significant mods that took ages to narrow down as the fault behind it. There's plenty of other mods out there too that I'm not using, and haven't used, that I'm sure are also breaking the game, but without more people reporting on this issue and keeping track of it, they aren't going to get fixed. For such a seemingly passionate modding community on the game, you'd think this issue would be a top priority for everyone. I'm still scratching my head as to why it's not.

I had to work extremely hard just to find this thread. So clearly it's not very visible, particularly in search engines.

 

I have to say I think modders such as WhyEm and other big names in the Red dead redemption 2 modding scene are very irresponsible promising these massive content and texture mods, but refusing to properly test them or even just acknowledging that they fundamentally severely break the game for a lot of people.

[JKL409 6]

On 12/28/2023 at 9:28 PM, nani17 said:

So I wiped all mods and started from the start.

 

Rampage

Bloodlust

Bandit hideouts

BountesExpansion

Online Content Unlocker

No Bounty with Mask

SmokingComplete

 

All of these are installed and I have trains with NPC's and I've had trains pass me more than once while ingame unlike before where I could play for an hour plus and not see one

 

 

That's interesting because I found that online content unlocker was one of the problematic mods for me. I'd be interested to know what resolution and settings you play with along with what kind of graphics card you use, because I'm wondering if it's related to the graphics settings simply being too high for the game to handle alongside these big content and texture mods.

[Dagger323 22]

11 hours ago, JKL409 said:

I had to work extremely hard just to find this thread. So clearly it's not very visible, particularly in search engines.

 

I have to say I think modders such as WhyEm and other big names in the Red dead redemption 2 modding scene are very irresponsible promising these massive content and texture mods, but refusing to properly test them or even just acknowledging that they fundamentally severely break the game for a lot of people.

Well there are evidently around 2,000 views of this thread on this site, yet only a handful of people have responded to it. Out of those two-thousand, I highly doubt we're the only ones who are experiencing this problem, considering how many mods I had to eliminate that were causing it.

 

I agree that modders should be taking more responsibility, particularly with testing this stuff before releasing mods. Even just one specific mod can and does totally break the NPC/wildlife spawns. What annoys me even more is when individuals post mods on Nexus, for example, and don't even enable bug reports or have a place to leave comments. Several of the character clothing/face/hair texture upscaling mods were particularly guilty of this, and most of those were responsible for breaking spawns.

[JKL409 6]

5 hours ago, Dagger323 said:

Well there are evidently around 2,000 views of this thread on this site, yet only a handful of people have responded to it. Out of those two-thousand, I highly doubt we're the only ones who are experiencing this problem, considering how many mods I had to eliminate that were causing it.

 

I agree that modders should be taking more responsibility, particularly with testing this stuff before releasing mods. Even just one specific mod can and does totally break the NPC/wildlife spawns. What annoys me even more is when individuals post mods on Nexus, for example, and don't even enable bug reports or have a place to leave comments. Several of the character clothing/face/hair texture upscaling mods were particularly guilty of this, and most of those were responsible for breaking spawns.

I had read on one or two reddit threads that there may have been an update to the game at some point that altered how textures are streamed as a way to fix crashes that were occurring which may be causing the issue. However, I have no way to verify if this is indeed the case as I'm unable to test previous versions of the game.

 

I'm also not hugely familiar with the way rage engine gameconfig files work, so I'm unable to test for myself if there's a solution buried in there somewhere. I do believe some users were saying they had varying levels of success using stutter fix mods, but I'm not hugely confident that they would be stable in preventing the issue from occurring.

 

It does seem that turning some of the graphical settings up could potentially worsen the issue. However, that doesn't excuse the modders who should be making this clear from the get go.

[Dagger323 22]

7 hours ago, JKL409 said:

I had read on one or two reddit threads that there may have been an update to the game at some point that altered how textures are streamed as a way to fix crashes that were occurring which may be causing the issue. However, I have no way to verify if this is indeed the case as I'm unable to test previous versions of the game.

 

I'm also not hugely familiar with the way rage engine gameconfig files work, so I'm unable to test for myself if there's a solution buried in there somewhere. I do believe some users were saying they had varying levels of success using stutter fix mods, but I'm not hugely confident that they would be stable in preventing the issue from occurring.

 

It does seem that turning some of the graphical settings up could potentially worsen the issue. However, that doesn't excuse the modders who should be making this clear from the get go.

I happen to be running the game at max ultra settings in 4K (with some additional settings in the system.xml file turned up as well for added visual improvements). Funnily enough, I'm also running the game with a stutter fix mod to fix the horrible texture and asset pop-in that has occurred since the game's September 2022 update. Since discovering the spawning issues, I've tested the game with both lowered graphical settings as well as disabling the stutter fix mod. In my particular case, there doesn't seem to be any notable difference after doing so if I still am running other mods that I've confirmed are causing the spawning problems. I don't know how there haven't been more people who've reported this, unless they're so focused on what their mods themselves are designed to do that they're simply not paying attention to the wildlife and NPCs.

Edited February 10 by Dagger323

[antoine66 0]

Hi, I just reinstalled the game after 3 years gap (got it on ps4 back in the days). And now playing on PC, and wanted to add some mods. And I ran into your thread (kinda by mistake actually, was searching a mod for better texture quality on NPCs). Anyway, it seems I'll have to only get a few if want to get some life in the game.

And I'm not sure the modders are much to blame, imo they might have not noticed this problem, and as you said, maybe too focused on the texture quality, and forgetting the other parts of the game. But it's good you're talking about it, might bring a little more awarerness about this problem. At least it did for me, and you "saved" me from having an empty experience after installing all the mods.
But I have a question for you, as for me, horses are a pretty big element in the game. Were you able to run any horse mod without the NPC problem ? And also, just searching for one mod, there are so many that I'm lost. Any "single" horse mod you would advice?

 

Thanks for your help,

[JKL409 6]

1 hour ago, antoine66 said:

Hi, I just reinstalled the game after 3 years gap (got it on ps4 back in the days). And now playing on PC, and wanted to add some mods. And I ran into your thread (kinda by mistake actually, was searching a mod for better texture quality on NPCs). Anyway, it seems I'll have to only get a few if want to get some life in the game.

And I'm not sure the modders are much to blame, imo they might have not noticed this problem, and as you said, maybe too focused on the texture quality, and forgetting the other parts of the game. But it's good you're talking about it, might bring a little more awarerness about this problem. At least it did for me, and you "saved" me from having an empty experience after installing all the mods.
But I have a question for you, as for me, horses are a pretty big element in the game. Were you able to run any horse mod without the NPC problem ? And also, just searching for one mod, there are so many that I'm lost. Any "single" horse mod you would advice?

 

Thanks for your help,

 

Basically don't install any texture, asset mods or gameconfig/systemsettings edits and you should be fine. The issue is it's extremely difficult to detect this problem until you either compare to the base game or you notice one of the following: you can't find a rare animal, the same animals are repeating, there are no trains appearing, no peds on trains, empty trams, or only ever one person on board a carriage (no passenegers) etc. 

[Lonewulv13 2]

Didn't even occur to me until reading this. I've just spent a month adding and optimizing a ton of mods and just now I'm realizing- yeah I haven't been seeing peds on trams. This is utterly bullshit. I can't go back to vanilla after experiencing the joy of all these mods... Surely some tech savvy modder can bypass the engine bottleneck and force peds to spawn normally. Surely it can't be that difficult...

[JKL409 6]

1 hour ago, Lonewulv13 said:

Didn't even occur to me until reading this. I've just spent a month adding and optimizing a ton of mods and just now I'm realizing- yeah I haven't been seeing peds on trams. This is utterly bullshit. I can't go back to vanilla after experiencing the joy of all these mods... Surely some tech savvy modder can bypass the engine bottleneck and force peds to spawn normally. Surely it can't be that difficult...

Essentially until someone decides to seriously look into this issue there's nothing we can do. GTA V modders were able to work around a very similar issue in GTA V by using a script file that manually adjusted the amount assets that could be loaded. But unfortunately one doesn't seem to currently exist for RDR2. 

[Jrw174 0]

1 hour ago, JKL409 said:

Essentially until someone decides to seriously look into this issue there's nothing we can do. GTA V modders were able to work around a very similar issue in GTA V by using a script file that manually adjusted the amount assets that could be loaded. But unfortunately one doesn't seem to currently exist for RDR2. 

Whats the name of the mod? I'm a programmer and can take a look. No promises though

[JKL409 6]

2 hours ago, Jrw174 said:

Whats the name of the mod? I'm a programmer and can take a look. No promises though

I believe it's this one here:

https://www.gta5-mods.com/tools/heapadjuster