Where are the traders?

[TaxCollectorFromTheIRS]

So, I've been playing on my snowball earth world. It's on the normal survival mode and ruins exist everywhere. I put my starting climate to the lowest, so I live in the poles, and I set global temperature down to snowball earth. I've noticed a severe lack of ANY traders in my world. Do traders not spawn at the poles?

[Diff]

I've never snowballed myself, but I did watch a youtuber snowball the other day, and they had traders spawning in. Caused a small problem on that run cause one of the few rare pieces of grass was protected by the trader's claim.

[TaxCollectorFromTheIRS]

Strange, I can't find any at all, I've traveled 10k blocks south, good couple thousand blocks north east and west. There's just nothin

[LadyWYT]

I'm thinking they take one look at your nametag and make themselves scarce. 

Jokes aside, what version are you playing, and are you using mods? If you're playing a release candidate, you've likely encountered a bug, and will want to report it on the Github bug tracker. If you're using mods though, it's possible one could be affecting trader spawns.

It also doesn't hurt to create a new world to see if the issue persists. You might also try turning on the colored map(assuming it was disabled), as the colored map makes the traders much easier to find.

[TaxCollectorFromTheIRS]

12 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I'm thinking they take one look at your nametag and make themselves scarce. 

Jokes aside, what version are you playing, and are you using mods? If you're playing a release candidate, you've likely encountered a bug, and will want to report it on the Github bug tracker. If you're using mods though, it's possible one could be affecting trader spawns.

It also doesn't hurt to create a new world to see if the issue persists. You might also try turning on the colored map(assuming it was disabled), as the colored map makes the traders much easier to find.

I have a lot of mods, but they've never created this issue before. The only traders I CAN find are from expanded food, the Kitchenware traders. Which I've never seen in any other world I've made recently. Is there a limit to how many structures can spawn in a given area? Cause if so Better ruins might be the issue since there's random clusters of better ruins around, usually all bunched up.

[gilt-kutabe]

I’ve played snowball quite a bit, and no, traders don’t really spawn. Multiple worlds, no mods, with mods. However, going south far enough you get warmer, not as snow covered areas, you start to get traders in those. I’m pretty sure something was changed to prevent them from spawning in extremely cold/snow-covered environments. Could have been intentional, could be a bug idk.

Edited August 18, 2025 by gilt-kutabe

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, TaxCollectorFromTheIRS said:

Is there a limit to how many structures can spawn in a given area?

I don't think there is, unless it's a story location. Given what others here have said though, it sounds like it's probably due to picking the Snowball Earth setting--the world is getting treated like it's the arctic, so not much is spawning.

[Diff]

Went to see if I could find an answer in the ancient texts, and turns out in assets/survival/worldgen/structures.json, it was written that traders shall not spawn if it's colder than -14C outside. Similarly, arctic supplies don't spawn if it's any warmer than -14C, so that seems to be some sort of snowball tipping point for worldgen.

[TaxCollectorFromTheIRS]

On 8/18/2025 at 3:08 PM, Diff said:

Went to see if I could find an answer in the ancient texts, and turns out in assets/survival/worldgen/structures.json, it was written that traders shall not spawn if it's colder than -14C outside. Similarly, arctic supplies don't spawn if it's any warmer than -14C, so that seems to be some sort of snowball tipping point for worldgen.

Ah. That would explain that. Little unfortunate since I wanted to do the story stuff on this save.

[Diff]

42 minutes ago, TaxCollectorFromTheIRS said:

Ah. That would explain that. Little unfortunate since I wanted to do the story stuff on this save.

You could edit the files/make a mod to make traders snowball-compatible. Or, I've never published a mod before, but I'd be willing to take a crack at it. Only gotcha is that it wouldn't be able to generate traders in your existing snowball world.

[Thorfinn]

10 hours ago, Diff said:

Only gotcha is that it wouldn't be able to generate traders in your existing snowball world.

In the areas you have already been.

I'm pretty sure you could do a prune and revisit those areas of the map and traders would spawn in according to your new rules.

Once you finish up changes to the .JSONs, just run ModMaker.exe from your install directory. It will walk you through everything. Remember to use #3 (I think) to restore your install to vanilla, then check to make sure your packaged mod works fine. The upload process to ModDB can be a bit confusing the first time, but it's not that bad.

[Diff]

14 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

just run ModMaker.exe from your install directory

And here I've been manually writing patch files like a d*ng fool. And I see ModMaker has an option to convert the vanilla assets to actual JSON? Handy stuff, I've just been ignoring my IDE yelling about all the unquoted property names. Although apparently the ModMaker-generated modinfo.json has 2 different properties that apparently are invalid/not allowed to be uploaded. Not sure what that's about.

Anyway, here's Wonderwall.

https://mods.vintagestory.at/snowballtraders

Edited August 24, 2025 by Diff

[Thorfinn]

12 hours ago, Diff said:

And here I've been manually writing patch files like a d*ng fool.

You and me both. I even created entities using individual graphics for each view, instead of using the Model Creator, because that was what I saw in every mod I downloaded.