I posted this question in the support, but I did not receive an answer. Essentially, I have a lot of race mods installed, and when I encounter a village of NPCs, several of them will periodically vaporize and drop their pixels without me doing anything. Sometimes a quest giver will even die when I'm out on my quest, so I can't complete it. I've tried removing race mods one at a time, such as removing Kazdra, then rebooting and going into a different village to observe what happens, but no matter what I do, NPCs won't stop dying. I really don't want to play Starbound with only the vanilla races at this point, so any help would be appreciated. Log is attached.
Based on a quick analysis of the log it seems like your problem is actually a mod by the name of "Weapon_GrandArmory" (the name is referenced directly from the log, I do not know what this mod is) It uses some improper patching to the NPC files, this is probably the most common way to accidentally kill a NPC with a mod. You should give this log the the author of the "Weapon_GrandArmory" mod, and tell them that the mod is causing the NPCs to spontaneously disappear.
I actually did try to remove this mod since I saw a lot of errors in the log referencing it, and NPCs were still disappearing when I went back in. However, could it be that the damage is already done when the universe is generated or something? Would starting a new game without Grand Armory maybe fix it? Thanks for the reply, BTW. I really want to play some Starbound at this point instead of spending my evenings trying to figure this out.
I did a fresh install of the game and all mods, deleted all the npc patches in iHart's Grand Armory mod, and started a new game. I fought 3 cultists on the starting world; the last one followed me as I ran away, then suddenly stopped moving and died. Here is the log of a full play session; I really need to find the problem if I want to keep playing this game.
Code: Exception caught loading asset: /dialog/combat.config:lostTarget, (AssetException) Could not read JSON asset /dialog/combat.config:lostTarget eventually getting to the reason Code: Error parsing json: bad array, should be ',' or ']' at 13:7 Apparently someone didn't test their mod before releasing it. Well... it happens. For you, some actionable steps are doing a file search (from \starbound\mods\) for Code: combat.conf* That will list if someone is patching(what they should be doing) or replacing the file. One has a JSON error. Beyond that, you might just re-download all these file and hope you simply had an outdated mod or two that have since been fixed.
Thank you for the reply! Would the combat.config also explain why NPC villagers that don't engage in combat disappear? Below are the search results. All of them are a patch file. Should I just delete all of them, assuming they're just new speech bubbles?
Did you find anything? I had this problem rarely but I did a cleanup, removed all my mods, then reinstalled everything I absolutely needed and it solved the issue. Probably a race mod that had a little bit of bad patching. Ever since then, I don't really install any mods (I went from over 160 to 3). I only use FU, drop disabled for survival, and the mod that I'm developing.
I'm fairly certain I solved the issue by simply deleting the "dialog" folder of every race mod, so props to @bk3k for pointing that out. I might miss some quirky one liners that way, but compared to NPCs exploding as I walk through a village, it's a million times better, and I still get to keep the mods.
