NPC schedules often break and people just walk to the top of the map!

[Thebunyipman]

Hello!

I've been trying to build a huge modpack. It's probably an impossible dream but I've been having some curious issues and I can't find anyone else talking about similar. Here's my latest SMAPI log: https://smapi.io/log/20cad21bf2ee45a2845c70273bbfcda0

The problem is occasionally NPCs will just break. Penny will just start her washing up animation while standing in the middle of town. Groups of NPCs will just walk to the north of the town map passing through buildings and fences like they're nothing. You can still talk to them (assuming they're not stood in the middle of a lake or the river) and they reset the next day.

I know there's too many mods there and slimming down substantially is probably a valid answer, but has anyone experienced this before and does anyone know what particular thing might be causing it?

 

[Quirinea]

It maybe just one mod having broken warp points (I have seen reports of certain mods causing NPC:s to move oddly; some version of Walk to the Desert gave this, at least.
I'd see at mods adding areas or routes.
Hmmm. You usually cannot remove mods that add people without getting a mess, but you might try to make a list of mods that add areas or routes and remove about half of them. If NPC:s still wander off, remove another half. If not, switch (binary search, faster operation than trying one by one). Rinse and repeat.
Have you seen a patterns on that odd behaviour? Or does it seem to be random? If former, it may be easier to hunt down.
If you have time and energy, you could start new saves with a subset of all your mods... (and you're not experiencing game freezing? That's a possible result of trying to add each and every mod...

 

[Thebunyipman]

It maybe just one mod having broken warp points (I have seen reports of certain mods causing NPC:s to move oddly; some version of Walk to the Desert gave this, at least.
I'd see at mods adding areas or routes.
Hmmm. You usually cannot remove mods that add people without getting a mess, but you might try to make a list of mods that add areas or routes and remove about half of them. If NPC:s still wander off, remove another half. If not, switch (binary search, faster operation than trying one by one). Rinse and repeat.
Have you seen a patterns on that odd behaviour? Or does it seem to be random? If former, it may be easier to hunt down.
If you have time and energy, you could start new saves with a subset of all your mods... (and you're not experiencing game freezing? That's a possible result of trying to add each and every mod...

That's probably the way to go about testing for the issue, but thanks for the steer on broken warp points. In terms of patterns not really. Some days Penny is completely broken, some days she isn't. Some nights all the townies wander north, some nights they don't. It takes annoyingly long to test as you'll see a character you knew to be broken act normally, then days later they'll bug out again!

 

[Thebunyipman]

Just to update if anyone comes across this in the future. The answer was updating Spritemaster. It was breaking NPC schedules but the current version fixes all of that!