STW Civilians Spawner — Online Manual

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STW Civilians Spawner is a server-authoritative STW (ScienceTechWorks) system for automatic civilian settlement zones. It is designed to work with the ordinary Ambient Civilians system while managing the locations it creates itself. No player-side setup is required.

What it adds

After a short startup delay, the server scans terrain buildings and settlement signals to create small, medium, and large civilian zones. It recognises ordinary building groups as well as qualifying isolated houses and farms, church-centred villages, and house clusters that cross normal scan-cell boundaries.

Settlement-first detection

Building counts, cluster radii, and density thresholds determine zone size. Additional urban centers can improve coverage in large towns and cities.

Controlled exclusion areas

Airport, military, and optional harbour exclusions prevent inappropriate zones, while dense genuine settlements can be allowed through selected outer safety bands.

Restart-safe recovery

Calculated zones can be cached per scenario and map. Restoring is delayed and batched by default to avoid competing with server startup.

For players

There is no player menu or client-side configuration. Civilian zones are part of the server’s active scenario. If the administrator enables them, zone markers display when the map is at or above the configured zoom threshold.

For Game Masters and scenario hosts

This mod manages automatic civilian zones from the server world; it does not add a manual placement tool. removeExistingAutomaticZones defaults to true, and disableAmbientCiviliansAutomaticZones defaults to true: the latter sets Ambient Civilians’ automatically discovered location counts to zero while retaining STW zones and civilian vehicles.

Use settlementCacheRevision to deliberately force a new terrain scan after changing detection logic or when you want to invalidate an existing calculated-zone cache.

Server setup

Install and enable STW Civilians Spawner on the server, then start the intended scenario and map once.
The mod creates $profile:STW/Civilians/STWCiviliansConfig.json.
Stop the server before editing the file. Back it up, make valid JSON changes, and restart.
Values are validated on startup; cached zones are either restored or newly calculated as the settings require.

Safe tuning: start near the defaults. Raising the zone limit, reducing separations, or weakening exclusion rules can significantly increase civilian coverage and server work on dense terrains.

Configuration

The main configuration is $profile:STW/Civilians/STWCiviliansConfig.json.

Setting	Default	Meaning
`showCivilianMarkers` `markerZoomThreshold`	true / 1.5 PPU	Shows zone markers and controls their minimum map zoom. A threshold of zero disables zoom filtering.
`generationDelaySeconds`	12	Delay before settlement analysis begins.
`maximumZones`	160	Global cap on created civilian zones.
`minimumBuildingsPerCell`	3	Normal building count required in a scan cell to qualify as a settlement.
`detectIsolatedHousesAndFarms` `useChurchesAsSettlementAnchors` `useHouseClustersAsSettlements`	true / true / true	Additional settlement signals for sparse rural areas and villages.
`mediumBuildingThreshold` `largeBuildingThreshold`	6 / 32	Density thresholds used for zone classification.
`enableAdditionalUrbanCenters`	true	Adds useful extra coverage centers. Default separations are 100 m small, 160 m medium, and 220 m large.
`excludeAirports` `excludeMilitaryAreas` `excludeHarbours`	true / true / false	Enables restricted-area checks. Default airport and military exclusion radii are 400 m and 250 m; harbour exclusion is 300 m when enabled.

Cache recovery

Persistence recovery defaults to a 120-second extra delay, one cached zone per batch, and 1000 ms between batches. Set the recovery delay to zero only if you explicitly want restoration to begin as soon as the normal startup delay ends.

Persistence

Persistence is enabled by default. Calculated settlement zones are saved under $profile:STW/Persistence/STW_Civilians_SCENARIO_MAP.json and reused after restarts of the same scenario and map. Increase settlementCacheRevision to force a fresh scan rather than reuse the cache.

To reset one cached zone set safely, stop the server, identify and back up only its matching civilian persistence file, then move or delete it before restarting.

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