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Hey - actually I didn't think anyone was really using this, and I've been hit with big projects on my actual job-job, so haven't taken the time to get this updated.

Given how fast people updated other mods for A14, I'm guessing this should be easy enough.   There are still other tweaks I'd like to make. 

I actually started playing A14 a bit to get a feel for it, and I was already shaking my fist after the first 2 or 3 caravans I got would buy nothing I had, so I couldn't pick up anything they had either, and then I went forever without another caravan ... so I want to get this mod running again soon, heh heh.

Not sure if I'll get the chance to update it quickly, unless I can just more or less recompile it and hope for the best.   My biggest fear is that I took the vanilla caravan generation code and rewrote it to handle the new caravan goods, and if that changed significantly in vanilla, I may get hit with some weird quirks.


I'll shoot for the weekend to get it recompiled and running without exploding at least.   Then I need to make sure the compatibility I worked on before for things like Expanded Prosthetics and Aparello, Combat Realism, etc still work (hopefully they will work as-is, but if any of them had to change some things they do, I may need to change it myself) ...


Thanks for the interest!   I haven't vanished, so this will get refurbished to A14 Soon^tm

I wish you and Orion could work together and seize the opportunity to grow Hospitality and SCWSD into the "One Mod To Rule Them All"

I may bug Orion to see about doing this.   Actually I use Hospitality myself, and it was one of my personal requirements to make sure my mod didn't interfere with it.    At present they work fine together, the only thing being that the caravans my mod produces don't get the "guest" tabs and such.    However, I *believe* it should be possible to have them work together.  I'll do a little research to see if I can do it myself, if not I may start poking Orion.

I kinda remember a system in Fallout 4, that you have to set up a place for caravans to visit your settlements, why not do anything like that? a barn.. to store the Pack-Mufallos, a place for them to sleep, while.. a patch with hospitality allows you to handle the npcs, plus trade with them, because Hospitality breaks a barrier and allows the player to interact with caravaneers from your mod, disabling the ability to trade with them temporalily, maybe also, grow the mod to allow, not only scheduled caravans, but "passing traders" making your colony a hub for trade, traders visiting other factions while passing through your colony, for a quick stop, rest-stop.

I actually originally planned to do something like this, having an actual trading post.    However, it's being done by someone else, currently.   Not 100% sure of the status on it.     They're doing a Dwarf Fortress-esque thing with having a trading post that the caravans will visit and unload at.   I'm not entirely sure how compatible this will be out of the gate, but it will be a high priority for me to work with, as it's more or less what I wanted to do myself.

One thing I am concerned with though is from what I can gather so far - it'll be possible to be compatible with either Hospitality, or this Trade Post/DF style one, but not both.   (I could be wrong though).     Unless of course they end up being compatible with each other.

[Select a pawn and right click the building to open the management window. (It acts like a Comms Console)]

Because you right-click on the caravan desk and activate it to get the screen, not the relations tab on the bottom.

Thanks i didn't even know there WAS a table. Would be great if the first post mentioned that somewhere that it actually shows more. I mean i reread it again but it didn't say it was a table only a manager which made me think it was just a tab.

How to use / how it works:
Build a "Trade Caravan Manager" building from the Misc tab to enable trading.    If you don't have a building, caravans will revert to vanilla.  Select a pawn and right click the building to open the management window. (It acts like a Comms Console)    (I'm not 100% happy with this, but it was a way to keep things non-interfering with any other mods touching Comms Consoles or the Faction tabs.   Feedback here is good, because it may be annoying enough to warrant changing.)

It's right there since the very first post 

Actually I would like to find a bit better/intuitive way of doing it.   Several other mods are playing with the Factions tab as well as Comms Consoles, so I was hesitant to use those.     Originally I did want to hook it to the Factions tab, as that made the most sense ... need to find some decent alternative.

Quick question, I've noticed traders are a bit bugged in my current game, meaning the "Group is visiting, have a few items to trade"-traders not the caravans.
Selling them items works, but if they have no inventory space they will pay for what you sell them but leave anything they can't carry behind.

Is this a problem with CR? Maybe a conflict between it and Hospitality?

It's caused by the weight & bulk system in CR.    Traders without pack animals will drop excess inventory.     (Caravans don't have the issue due to pack muffalos having unlimited carry capacity)

Small traders were disabled in CR to avoid the issue, but any mods that add them in will face the issue.   

It would be interesting if the caravans got fed up with you if you didn't actually trade with them, and there was an imposed delay between when you could request caravans depending on how 'profitable' the previous caravan was. Surely they don't like to send out people for no good reason.

That way people would be more likely to only request caravans when they have stuff to trade rather than just requesting them immediately on the off-chance they have something the player wants, or whatever.

No idea how yoi could determine whether a trade caravan was 'profitable' though.

That's actually a precise "to do" I have on the main page already.    I planned to add in having you get slightly + or slightly - relations, depending how much stuff you buy from them, or how much stuff you sell to them.    It'll probably be the first major addition I do, beyond adding compatibility for other main mods.   

Nice work, awesome mod.
Could you please add a version number to your thread name or download links?
So the people can easily check if their mod is up to date?

Ah yeah - actually the .zip files themselves are named  (newer one is 13.01, original is 13.00, but not the links).    I'll update it accordingly.    I kind of threw the update out in a rush, heh heh.

Bit of an update.    I've got about 75% support for Apparello so you can buy/sell the majority of gear from that now.   I've been working on compatibility with the Hardcore SK mod pack, so you can run this with that.    It seems to work, but so many new resources and things were added in it that the UI screen can't show them all.    Going to work on some way to fix it without things being brutally cluttered.     Otherwise it seems to work, just not 100% of things show up on scheduled caravans.

(You can use this version regardless what other mods you have - I'm trying to avoid separate versions for different mod compatibilities.   If you use a mod that it knows about, it works.   If you don't use the mod, it doesn't care.)

Download here.  (Main page updated with this link also)


Version isn't heavily tested, so I would recommend backing up your save in case something explodes, but worst case you can remove this mod and fix anything it does, I think.

how about a sending out trade request and then setting a (discount) on items so traders will be ore inclined to come if your prices are cheaper.

(just adding a % bonus in their favor)

Caravans already come on a set schedule with this  (although maybe you could have some kind of 'flash sale' thing if you need someone to send a caravan RIGHT NOW, heh heh)
   

I think they should send bigger caravans as your colony gets richer(and maybe relation and profit?). Currently I find most caravans little useless (although I haven't used your mod yet), 100 steel or 200 wood is ridiculously small for any colony with +10 colonists.

Other than that, I think this would be one of must have mod, probably should even integrated to game.

This mod actually completely redoes what caravans bring, so you ought to take a peek to see!    What each faction brings is totally dependent on their situation.   Tribals living in hills & mountains will bring you a lot more steel and stone and such.   

I've been playing it and the amounts seem balanced out well.    Factions with the largest amounts will have up to ~500 steel per caravan, but any tribal will *probably* bring you at least 200-300, and it's a bit cheaper. 

Also bear in mind that the caravans with this mod are guaranteed.   Every faction you have trade with will send 1 caravan every season, as opposed to the storyteller who will starve you forever if it deems you don't NEED a trader.

(If you haven't tried the mod yet - you *should* be able to just add it to an existing game without any harmful effects.   I would recommend backing up your save though, just for safety.   I don't want to get screamed at for bad advice ruining someone's huge colony!)


That is a good idea about having goods scale later on though - and it's not something that would be difficult to do.    I'll have to see if there's a decently balanced way to accomplish it.    Right now things are balanced as an "any time" thing, but certainly early on, the caravans will bring far more stuff than you can ever use.

Does trading with them also improve relations? like by 1 each time?

No impact on relations at the moment (unless you murder them, as usual).    A feature I have planned is to have some relation impact depending on how much you trade with them.    Right now you have no real reason not to just request caravans as quickly as they can come.

Later on you'll have to buy/sell some amount from them or they'll delay the next caravan and/or reduce faction a little.   

U should probably prioritise on more factions, but it's good that it's working with CR and EPOE

If you mean the More Factions Spawn mod, it actually does work completely fine, it just does something similar.    If you play with More Factions Spawn, you'll have 6 trading partners and 6 enemies.     Without it, you'll have 8 trading partners and 4 enemies.

I should probably update my main page to be a bit clearer in that More Factions Spawn works fine, it just gives you a couple less potential trading partners.


If you just meant "more factions" in general - it's a bit out of the scope of this mod, but I've already been looking at making a mod that just gives some slight diversity to the factions, because as it is the only trading partners you can have in vanilla are tribals and outlanders.

I had suggestion for Haplo and his Miscellaneous mods to create a diplomat to send pawn out of the area (despawn) and create incident to summon trade caravan after few days

I've got a potential/planned feature a lot like this.    I want to have you send your own caravans.   

You'd get much better prices, but will have to use tamed animals for pack animals, and send one or more colonists out, with according risks.

Not sure if/when I'll do it.   Depends on the reception to this mod, but I may just do it regardless, for my own use if nothing else!

5) Fix the damn traders. Either make it possible to invite the kind of trader you want or let them buy/sell more stuff. I never have enough steel and components and if I do, I have not silver to trade with because they never buy my clothes, sculptures or even guns in most cases.
6) Other intelligent species on planet! Not just humans you can recruit. Let's make some other alien being you can talk to trade goods/techs with and potentially add to your colony (after you research how to communicate with them or something like that)

there are tons of good ideas around. The game is fun but it lacks depth. If I don't play on higher difficulty I can start on colony ship during the second year and that is no fun...

about number 5 i am not sure how this will work but i will look about and see if there is a mod all ready for this.

Shameless plug for my mod I just put out:

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=19992.0


I was fed up with this myself, where you'd get a bunch of traders early on, but you can't buy or sell anything, and later on you don't get any.

My mod totally overhauls caravans and has them come on a schedule, with completely different buy/sell than vanilla.     

Just tried this out, it's pretty cool. It took me a moment to realize how to use the trade caravan workbench thing, but it all works.

Hah, yeah - you have to select a pawn and then use it, same as a Comms Console, but you actually don't need to path to it or anything.   I don't really like it, but I did it just to avoid conflicts until I figured out a better way.    Ideally I'd just tie it to the Comms Console, but then I may conflict with things a bit.

This looks interesting. I'm just starting new colony and will give it a try. Do you take data from map? Is time to arrival just constant + RNG, or is it possible to take into account distance factor?

I'm 99% sure it's completely possible to calculate the relative distance of any given faction to you, and have timers calculated by that (it's actually one of my planned features listed).    For now though, caravans come seasonally, plus or minus a week or two, and it's normalized to 1 / season, so you can't get 'unlucky' in the long run and have less caravans due to bad RNG ... eventually it will catch up.



But yes - I actually do take the map data for each faction you talk to.   The summary page showing them all has their terrain type and such listed, and their goods are impacted by that.   Factions in a desert biome have greatly reduced plant/food exports, for example.    Factions in forest type biomes will export much more wood on average ... things like that.

Quick question, do I need to start a new game or can this be added to an existing one?

It should work fine if you add this to an existing game.     I haven't tested it a lot for mod interactions, but should be safe.   Just load this mod last in the list or so.

You will need to make a new world map to get additional factions though.   So if you have vanilla factions only, you may be a bit light on trade partners.

sweet quick question though, would it be possible to edit the carry cap of visitors? I have the issue when using combat realism that visitors will drop most all of their trade goods as they eneter a map because they just cant carry it, and what they can carry max out their weight and they move so slow they starve before reaching my base o.O TRADERs are fine as the muffalo carry everything but normal visitors always die

As I understand, NoImageAvailable was going to disable small traders due to this.

I don't touch them myself, so it's not something I'd want to interfere with, as it's related to weight & bulk introduced in Combat Realism.

I only adjust caravans, and they have no troubles.

Is this compatible with Hospitality?

I play with Hospitality myself, and it seems to behave correctly.     It's possible at worst case you wouldn't be able to recruit or charm people from trade caravans, but there's no impact at all on normal visitor groups or things from this mod. 

Jessie! I'm just curious, how would this work with modded factions (ones with their own traders)?
Would a separate compatibility patch be required?

I'm actually hoping people add other factions!    I coded in support for Spacer tech people, even though there are none in vanilla.   (I didn't do a lot special with them - they act like Outlanders, but have better equipment on the traders, and want ultra tech stuff themselves)

Custom trade caravans are unaffected by this mod as well, so if you wanted very special traders for a new faction, they will still come per storyteller generation.

Other than that, this mod will grab any new factions and give them scheduled caravans, with goods based on their tech level and where their colony appears on the map.    Almost nothing is hard coded, so any other mods should get picked up and work right away!   ... at least I hope.