Mechanics

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The Tier System

RPGMobs classifies enemies into 5 tiers of power. These tiers determine an entity’s health, damage output, equipment quality, and ability access.

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Progression Styles

The mod decides where high-tier mobs spawn based on the progressionStyle setting in spawning.yml.

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1. Environment (Default)

Tiers are tied to Hytale’s zone difficulty.

• Zone 1 (Emerald Grove): Mostly Tier 1-2, no Tier 4-5.
• Zone 2 (Howling Sands): Mix of Tier 1-3, rare Tier 4.
• Zone 3 (Borea): Tier 2-5, no Tier 1.
• Zone 4 (Devastated Lands): Tier 3-5 only, the hardest content.

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2. Distance from Spawn

Difficulty scales linearly as you travel further from coordinates (0,0).

• Near Spawn: Safe, mostly vanilla or Tier 1.
• Deep Wilderness: Tiers gradually increase every ~1000 blocks (configurable).
• Bonus Stats: Mobs gain small health/damage bonuses every ~100 blocks between tier jumps, creating a smooth difficulty curve.

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3. None (Random)

Any tier can spawn anywhere based on global weights. Good for hardcore survival servers or arena maps.

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Combat System

RPGMobs uses a hybrid combat architecture. Basic attacks, guarding, retreat, and movement are handled by Hytale’s native CombatActionEvaluator (CAE). Special abilities, reactive parry, and dodge roll detection are handled code-side.

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CombatActionEvaluator (CAE)

The CAE is Hytale’s built-in combat evaluation system. RPGMobs generates per-style, per-tier, and per-weapon CAE configs at runtime. This gives every elite realistic combat behavior without requiring a code-side state machine. What CAE handles:

• Per-weapon basic attack chains with correct animations and sounds
• Sustained shield guard (T2+) - the mob raises its shield when taking sustained damage
• BackOff (T2+) - brief retreat after completing an attack chain
• Health retreat (T3+) - fleeing when health drops below a threshold
• Group observe (T3+) - grouped elites pause before joining combat
• Flanking (T5) - positioning behind the target
• Re-engage - automatically returning to combat after retreating

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Combat Styles

Each combat style defines a distinct combat personality that controls attack timing and behavior: See Combat AI for the full Admin UI editor and Combat for the YAML reference.

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Per-Tier Behavior Escalation

Higher tiers unlock more sophisticated combat behaviors:

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Reactive Parry

When a player starts an attack nearby, elite NPCs (T2+) have a chance to instantly raise their shield or weapon in a parry animation. The parry timing is based on the player’s weapon type - fast weapons (daggers) trigger an almost instant parry, while slow weapons (maces) give the NPC more time to react. The parry has a 20-tick cooldown between uses.

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Abilities

Elites aren’t just stat sponges. RPGMobs includes 9 combat abilities across melee, ranged, defensive, and support archetypes:

• Charge Leap: Launch at a player with a physics-based slam attack. 8 weapon-specific sound variants.
• Heal Leap: Jump to safety and drink a healing potion. Filtered by mob type - undead mobs are excluded by default.
• Summon: Call role-based reinforcements - summoners spawn NPCs matching their own role identifier.
• Dodge Roll: Reactive dodge when a nearby player attacks, or preemptive dodge when a player charges an attack. Grants brief invulnerability.
• Multi Slash (Short/Medium/Long): 3 separate melee combo abilities with 54 unique weapon-specific combos. Short (1-2 hits, all tiers), Medium (2-4 hits, T2+), Long (4-6 hits, T3+).
• Enrage: Berserk fist-fighting transformation. The mob drops its weapon and enters a 20-second rapid punch chain, then dies from exhaustion with normal loot drops.
• Volley: Ranged projectile burst for bow, crossbow, and gun wielders.

Each ability is linked to specific mob rules with per-tier toggles and weapon category gates. Abilities temporarily interrupt CAE control - the system calls terminateCurrentAction() to cleanly exit any CAE-managed action before starting the ability chain, then returns control to CAE when the ability completes. See Abilities for full configuration.

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CAE-to-Ability Transition

When an ability triggers, the following sequence occurs:

1. terminateCurrentAction() exits the current CAE action (guard, basic attack, retreat)
2. Any running interaction chains are cancelled
3. The ability’s interaction chain starts via InteractionManager.startChain()
4. setExecutingAttack(true) prevents CAE from starting new actions
5. The ability runs its full template chain
6. On completion, a global cooldown (1-3 seconds) prevents immediate ability chaining
7. setExecutingAttack(false) returns control to CAE

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Scaling

• Health: Multiplied per tier (e.g., Tier 5 has +260% base health).
• Damage: Multiplied per tier (e.g., Tier 5 deals 2.6x damage).
• Size: Higher tiers are physically larger (up to +18% scale).

See Stats for tuning these values.

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Equipment

Elites spawn with tier-appropriate gear from categorized weapon and armor pools. Higher tiers get rarer weapons and more armor pieces. A Tier 1 common goblin might have a crude wooden weapon, while a Tier 5 legendary skeleton could wield an adamantite longsword with full armor. Weapons and armor are organized into named categories (Swords, Axes, Staves, etc.). Mob rules reference these categories to control what equipment each mob type can receive. Per-mob armor slot restrictions prevent mobs whose models don’t support full armor from looking broken (e.g., void eyes get no armor). See Gear for equipment categories and rarity rules, and Mobs for per-mob restrictions.

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Overlay System

Servers running custom dungeons and temporary instances can customize RPGMobs behavior per-world via the overlay system. Base config lives in base/, per-world overlays in worlds/, and per-instance-template overlays in instances/. Each overlay can override spawning, stats, loot, abilities, and elite behavior independently. Instance worlds are automatically matched by their template name (case-insensitive). See Overlays for the full configuration reference.

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Loot System

Elites drop vanilla loot with multipliers (e.g., 6x drops from Tier 5) and have a chance to drop their equipped gear. Loot templates provide targeted drop tables linked to specific mob rules - for example, a “Goblin Boss Loot” template can give better rewards for Goblin_Duke and Goblin_Ogre kills. See Loot for drop rates, loot templates, and custom drop tables.

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Admin UI

All settings can be managed through the in-game Admin UI. Use /rpgmobs config to open the configuration panel with visual editors for every setting. See Admin UI for a guide to the interface.