Mob Respawn Timers

Proposed overworld mob respawn delays in Fractara, compared against the timers currently shipping in the server catalog.

The Current column is the respawn_time_ms value each species ships with in the server mob catalog. The Proposed column is the target. Ordinary fodder stays quick enough to keep encounters flowing; anything rare, valuable, or already scarce moves onto a much longer clock.

Proposed overworld respawn delays. Multipliers are rounded; ranges show the jittered window rather than a fixed delay.
Mob	Current	Proposed	Change	Notes
Goblin goblin	4 min	10 min	×2.5	Keeps Goblin Vengeance achievable
Goblin Archer goblin_archer	4 min	10 min	×2.5	Matches ordinary Goblins
Gyront gyront	5 min	15 min	×3	Common aquatic encounter
Crawler crawler	4 min	15 min	×3.75	Frequent ordinary hostile
Giant Crab crab	5 min	15 min	×3	Common aquatic encounter
Wolf wolf	5 min	30 min	×6	Packs contain 3–5 Wolves
Elk elk	3 min	30 min	×10	Avoids becoming the default farm
Frost Bat frost_bat	3 min	30 min	×10	Cold-biome packs contain 3–6
Nautiloid nautiloid	7 min	30 min	×4.3	Less-common aquatic encounter
Boar boar	5 min	45 min	×9	Scarce without overly depleting hunting areas
Shard-Hulk shard_hulk	12 min	1 hour	×5	Rare guardian / Cairn encounter
Basilisk basilisk	30 min	5–7 hours	×12	Six-hour average with jitter
Jotunn jotunn	30 min	5–7 hours	×12	Extremely rare cold-biome encounter
Phase Skitterer phase_skitterer	10 min	5–7 hours	×36	Valuable, trackable rare encounter
Dragon dragon	1 hour	5–7 hours	×6	No active overworld placement currently

How the tiers were drawn

Ten to fifteen minutes — common fodder

Goblins, Crawlers, Gyronts and Giant Crabs are the encounters a player is expected to meet constantly. They stay on the shortest clock so that travelling through a populated region still produces fights. Goblins in particular are held at ten minutes because Goblin Vengeance depends on a camp being repopulated within a session.

Thirty to forty-five minutes — packs and game animals

Wolves and Frost Bats arrive several at a time, so each respawn returns three to six bodies rather than one. Elk and Boar are the hunting supply, and at three to five minutes they were the cheapest route to sustained income. Half an hour makes a hunting ground something to move between rather than stand in, while forty-five minutes for Boar keeps them meaningfully scarcer than Elk without stripping a region bare.

One hour — guardians

The Shard-Hulk guards Cairns and other fixed points. An hour makes clearing one a decision about route and timing instead of a loop.

Five to seven hours — rare encounters

Basilisk, Jotunn, Phase Skitterer and Dragon are meant to be found, not farmed. A window averaging six hours means a given spawn point yields roughly two kills a day, and the jitter stops the return time from being memorised down to the minute. The Phase Skitterer takes the largest jump because it is both valuable and trackable — at ten minutes, a known spawn is effectively an income tap.

Implementation notes

Jitter is not implemented yet

The catalog stores a single fixed respawn_time_ms per species, and the zone lifecycle schedules a respawn at exactly

death + delay. The four five-to-seven-hour entries therefore need a randomised window added to the respawn scheduler before they can ship as written; without it they would land as a flat six hours.

Everything else in the table is a data-only change to the mob catalog. Respawn delay resolves per species at runtime and falls back to five minutes when a species does not author one, so a species omitted from the change keeps its current behaviour.

The proposal covers overworld spawns. Dungeon population is governed separately and is unaffected.

Sources

Current values are read from the server mob catalog at server/internal/world/mobs/catalog/data/catalog.json, field respawn_time_ms. Pack sizes are the min_pack_size and max_pack_size fields from the same records. Respawn scheduling lives in server/internal/world/zone/mob_lifecycle.go.