Barber

Commentary

I'm pretty happy with Barbers as-is. My biggest gripe with them is their extreme rarity - they were originally set to spawn in pairs in v55, and I think Zeekerss could have balanced their spawn weights around that fact. However, indoor enemies don't have group spawning behavior in vanilla, so that never actually worked in practice - this functionality was intentionally disabled in v56, but without any changes to spawn chances.

Barbers also have this really cool social behavior implemented, where the first one to spawn (the "master") controls the tempo of all Barbers that spawn afterwards. Unfortunately, in vanilla, some bugs prevent that behavior from working as intended, causing Barbers 2+ to get stuck silently sliding into walls. In v62, Zeekerss "solved" this problem by capping Barbers at 1 per day, which really neutered their prevalence in the game, and didn't actually address the core of this issue.

While you can already use Barber Fixes' config and Spawn Cycle Fixes to restore these behaviors, it highlights a new issue with the Barbers that cropped up in v60 - in the claustrophobic cavern shapes of the mineshaft interior, Barbers become nearly impossible to avoid. When there is a small army of them patrolling the mines it becomes completely uninhabitable.

I think the best way to address this issue is a happy medium between the original and the final implementations - Barbers populating factories and manors as they were set to in v55, and being limited to v62's values in the mineshaft.

Note: Make sure to disable the ApplySpawningSettings setting in the Barber Fixes config to avoid the values from this mod being overwritten, if you decide to enable Dynamic Spawn Settings.