Hostile monsters spawning in homo sapiens mode?

[SPITSPHIRE]

I just started the game having never played before aside from a small test i had done earlier in the year, and i wanted to get a good feel for the game without any of the added lore or supernatural content and id heard that the homo sapiens mode was supposed to provide that experience, so i started a new world with that preset.

After spending around an hour trying to learn the controls and mechanics id ended up getting stuck in the middle of a field in the middle of night with no light, food or shelter, and due to the fact it was raining i couldn't start a fire, so i ended up dying.

upon respawning and waiting for it to get light out again, i spent the next 20 or so minutes chopping down trees trying to build up a supply of wood so once i found a good spot i could build myself a shelter.

As i was exploring around i found what i can only describe as a horse drawn mobile home(?) with a friendly npc inside who acted as a merchant, and after having a chat with him i decided he would be a decent neighbor so i set about building myself a little wooden shelter nearby his house.

After a little bit the sun went down again and while i waited for the sun to come back up i built myself a little fire and started work on getting a few extra tools made with some flint id found.
While working on making myself a new axe, randomly a creature jumped out of the darkness in the corner of my screen and attacked me leaving me near dead while i was still in the menu, and then just as quickly ran off back into the darkness.
needless to say this has left me massively freaked out and i ended up leaving the game out of fear.

After looking around online im a bit confused as to my experience as from my understanding neither the npc nor this hostile creature should have been able to appear in my game with the homo sapiens mode enabled, so im wondering if people more experienced with the game then me can shed some light as to what's going on.

Did i set something up wrong or is my game bugged?
Im on 1.20.12 (stable)

Edited August 22, 2025 by SPITSPHIRE

[Diff]

The traders shouldn't be there, but there are still hostile creatures even without supernatural monsters. Several kinds of wild animals will still be after you, primarily wolves and bears. But also mooses, goats, boars if they've got piglets.

[SPITSPHIRE]

1 minute ago, Diff said:

The traders shouldn't be there, but there are still hostile creatures even without supernatural monsters. Several kinds of wild animals will still be after you, primarily wolves and bears. But also mooses, goats, boars if they've got piglets.

the creature that attacked me wasn't an animal, it was some sort of monster creature.

Ive tried to figure out what it was by looking at the wiki but im not really sure what it was, the closest in appearance is the shiver? but that creature looks more like a mutated dog creature, at least going off the wiki's pictures, where as the thing that attacked me was like a 4 legged spider and it made some horrible chittering/clacking sound at me.

[Diff]

5 minutes ago, SPITSPHIRE said:

the creature that attacked me wasn't an animal, it was some sort of monster creature.

Ive tried to figure out what it was by looking at the wiki but im not really sure what it was, the closest in appearance is the shiver? but that creature looks more like a mutated dog creature, at least going off the wiki's pictures, where as the thing that attacked me was like a 4 legged spider and it made some horrible chittering/clacking sound at me.

Ah that might be a bad picture on the wiki then, because chittering four legged spider sounds exactly like a shiver. Can't answer why he's there, but somehow you're definitely not in a homo sapiens world. 

[SPITSPHIRE]

Just now, Diff said:

Ah that might be a bad picture on the wiki then, because chittering four legged spider sounds exactly like a shiver. Can't answer why he's there, but somehow you're definitely not in a homo sapiens world. 

That's weird because ive checked multiple times and the game is saying my world is using the homo sapiens preset.

Is there a bug with the world generation or something?

How do i make it so the game will definitively give me a non horror experience, cause if i have to deal with those creature every time i play it will be a big nope from me.

[Koobze]

Are you playing with mods maybe? I ask because the only time I've seen Locust - Vintage Story Wiki these spider things on the surface was near ruins from a mod, though maybe they can also crawl out of caves. There might be mods that will also disable the monsters so that might be worth a shot, but I'm not sure - I don't like the monsters myself so I play with rifts disabled, but I do play in the exploration mode so they spawn in caves and elsewhere. I crank my player health and other stats all the way up, and lower the enemy stats also, so they're mainly a nuisance rather than a real threat - but I totally understand not wanting them there at all. It might also be worth checking if there's a "no monsters" multiplayer server you can connect to just to look around, I don't know if there's a way to see a server's "world config" but if there is you could check if there's any difference in how they set it up compared to how you did. And in general I try not to stay out after sunset, you can just sleep the night away in the trader's bed or idle standing in his wagon.

[SPITSPHIRE]

no, i haven't dabbled with any mods yet, its just a straight vanilla game install that i started a new world on.

Also it wasn't a locust that attacked me, it was a 4 legged creature around the size of a human/npc.
its possible it spawned from a nearby cave, but given i was on the homo sapiens mode there shouldn't have been any monster spawns at all.

[Facethief]

4 hours ago, SPITSPHIRE said:

no, i haven't dabbled with any mods yet, its just a straight vanilla game install that i started a new world on.

Also it wasn't a locust that attacked me, it was a 4 legged creature around the size of a human/npc.
its possible it spawned from a nearby cave, but given i was on the homo sapiens mode there shouldn't have been any monster spawns at all.

I have seen single monsters spawn with lore disabled, but I have no clue why.

[Ryilo]

It sounds like the lore content got activated by accident. To check this before loading the world click on the edit button, then click the customize button, then go in Survival challenges and check if lore content is enabled or not. You can unckeck it, click apply and see if the change takes effect.

[LadyWYT]

9 hours ago, SPITSPHIRE said:

where as the thing that attacked me was like a 4 legged spider and it made some horrible chittering/clacking sound at me.

Definitely a shiver.

 

1 hour ago, Ryilo said:

It sounds like the lore content got activated by accident. To check this before loading the world click on the edit button, then click the customize button, then go in Survival challenges and check if lore content is enabled or not. You can unckeck it, click apply and see if the change takes effect.

Yeah, as Ryilo said, I would check the settings on your world to make sure that lore content didn't get enabled by accident. If lore content is disabled and you still have monsters spawning, I would check any mods that you might be using and potentially disable them all and try playing a copy of that world(you can copy/paste the file in your Saves folder) to see if the issue persists. 

If the issue persists, or you were playing vanilla to begin with, then it sounds like it's bug report time!

[SPITSPHIRE]

4 hours ago, Ryilo said:

It sounds like the lore content got activated by accident. To check this before loading the world click on the edit button, then click the customize button, then go in Survival challenges and check if lore content is enabled or not. You can unckeck it, click apply and see if the change takes effect.

Im not seeing the option to customise a already generated world.

just the options to copy settings to the clipboard and to delete the world.

[Ryilo]

Oh, right, that was added in 1.21... 

Use the command /worldconfig loreContent to see if it is set to true or false

To use the command, with the chatbox closed press the T key, then write the command.

[Facethief]

On 8/22/2025 at 2:26 PM, Ryilo said:

Oh, right, that was added in 1.21... 

Use the command /worldconfig loreContent to see if it is set to true or false

To use the command, with the chatbox closed press the T key, then write the command.

Doesn’t / work to open the chatbox with a slash?

[LadyWYT]

5 minutes ago, Facethief said:

Doesn’t / work to open the chatbox with a slash?

It does. I've done it a few times, sometimes intentionally.

[Ryilo]

It's not always / ,  it changes depending on keyboard layout/language