SpawnKit — spawn any creature, anywhere

📖 Full documentation: SpawnKit wiki page

⚠️ Alpha. This is early software: the core spawn/despawn/AI loop is solid and well-tested, but you will hit rough edges (see Known issues below) — roughly a quarter of the creature roster doesn't spawn yet, co-op is built but not yet live-verified on a real two-machine session, and there's an occasional cosmetic terrain glitch. Back up saves you care about before experimenting.

Press F11, pick a creature, spawn it beside you.

SpawnKit gives you a real vanilla hostile — not a dummy or a stand-in. It wanders, it aggros, it fights, it drops its normal loot, and it dies like the wild version, because it is the wild version. Spawn a pack of hyenas to train on. Drop a Tuanosaur next to a bandit camp and watch them fight each other. Restock a region you've already cleared out.

Spawns are ephemeral: they never enter your save file, and they vanish when you leave the area.

Requires: BepInEx 5 (Outward's Mono branch — see Compatibility), plus CompanionKit and ForgeKit. If you install through a mod manager these come along automatically.

Installing

Install from Thunderstore and the dependencies come with it. Installing by hand: drop all three folders — ForgeKit/, CompanionKit/, SpawnKit/ — side by side into BepInEx/plugins/. If BepInEx logs a dependency error and refuses to load SpawnKit, one of the other two is missing.

Using it

Launch the game, load a save, and press F11 for a draggable window listing every creature you can spawn.

• ● means the creature is ready — it spawns instantly.
• ○ means it's cold: the first spawn pauses 1–6 seconds while SpawnKit fetches its body (see How it works). Click Prewarm to pay that cost up front instead.
• Set a count, hit Spawn, and use Despawn All / Kill All to clean up.

The key is rebindable ([Menu] MenuKey; Backslash is the classic debug-menu choice), and the menu closes on Esc, on F11 again, or when you open a vanilla menu.

Settings

BepInEx/config/cobalt.spawnkit.cfg, created on first launch:

Example configuration

BepInEx/config/cobalt.spawnkit.cfg — created on first launch. Excerpt (defaults, all four sections):

[Spawner]
Enabled = true
AllowSpawnInRoom = false
MaxActiveSpawns = 8
SpawnDistance = 5
MaxCachedTemplates = 12
## Vanilla leaves the corpse + loot; NoBody deletes both after death.
DefaultCorpsePolicy = Vanilla
DefaultCorpseLingerSeconds = 0
ForceLootableEnabled = true

[Menu]
EnableMenu = true
## The spawn-menu key; Backslash is the classic debug-menu choice.
MenuKey = F11

[Expedition]
EnableExpeditions = true
ConfirmMenuExpedition = true

[Coop]
EnableCoopSpawns = true
DespawnOnMirrorFailure = true
MirrorQueueTimeoutSeconds = 20
VerboseNet = true
HeartbeatSeconds = 30

The command channel is BepInEx/config/SpawnKit_cmd.txt (see Without the menu below). The species→scene roster comes from CompanionKit and is overridable by dropping a BepInEx/config/DonorScenes.txt (see How it works). The workspace's pinned-key overlay is config/shared/cobalt.spawnkit.cfg.overlay, applied by scripts/sync-config.py.

Without the menu

Everything is also driven by writing a line into BepInEx/config/SpawnKit_cmd.txt — it runs on the next poll, even while the game is paused. Useful for scripting or if a keybind conflicts.

⚠️ Known issues — read this bit

Some creatures don't work. Roughly a quarter of the rows in the list fail to spawn — their body can't be found in the scene the table expects. You'll get a clear message in the log rather than anything harmful. This is being chipped away at.

Co-op works when everyone has the mod (built 2026-07-18, not yet live-verified). The host spawns; every guest running SpawnKit automatically mirrors the creature as a real networked enemy — it moves, fights, dies and drops loot for everyone, just like a normal world enemy. Guests still can't initiate spawns (host-only, refused cleanly). The handshake protects you: if any player in the room doesn't have SpawnKit, in-room spawns refuse and the log names who — because to them the spawn would be an invisible ghost (log spam for an entity they can't see, and it wails forever on their invulnerable replicas, locking the host in combat). [Spawner] AllowSpawnInRoom=true overrides that refusal if you accept those players seeing nothing; [Coop] EnableCoopSpawns=false turns the whole co-op layer off (back to refuse-in-room). skcoopdump shows the co-op state on either machine.

Transport (NetKit cutover, 2026-07-18). The co-op wire is no longer SpawnKit's own relay: SpawnNet is now a thin facade over NetKit's shared sk channel. NetKit owns the one Photon relay (NK_Bus on CharacterManager's view), the single handshake (nk.hello) + peer/absence detection, the join hooks, the heartbeat ([Net] HeartbeatSeconds now drives the [SKNET] hb line), and the PUN diagnostics — SpawnKit keeps only the spawn semantics (the sk.spawn/sk.gone/ sk.ack/sk.fail/sk.resync verbs, their codecs, and the mirror-gate policy). Everything above is behaviour-preserving; the visible change is that per-message logging now rides [Net] VerboseNet (NetKit's .cfg) and netdump (or skcoopdump, which folds it in) is the transport census. Cutover: new builds speak NK_Bus only — an old SpawnKit build (SK_Bus) looks unmodded to the new handshake and is refused co-op, which is fine because the kits ship as one bundle.

A rare visual glitch. Very occasionally, after a lot of spawning in one session, a patch of ground can go invisible (you can still walk on it) — changing zone and coming back repairs it.

How it works

Outward has no way to create a creature from nothing — every creature is baked into the scene it lives in. So SpawnKit borrows one: it quietly loads the scene a species lives in, copies a live creature out of it, gives the copy a fresh identity, drops it on solid ground near you, and unloads the scene again. That's the 1–6 second pause on a cold spawn, and it's why the result behaves perfectly — it's the same creature the game itself would have spawned, not an imitation.

The creature roster comes from CompanionKit, which owns the table mapping each species to the scenes it can be found in. spawnlist prints it. You can add or fix an entry without rebuilding anything by dropping a DonorScenes.txt into BepInEx/config/:

Hyena=Emercar_Dungeon5,ChersoneseDungeonsSmall
Alpha Tuanosaur=Hallowed_Dungeon3,HallowedMarshNewTerrain

Region-only creatures need an extra step. Open-world regions and towns are too big to load in the background — trying it crashes the game, so SpawnKit refuses to. Creatures that live only out in a region (Pearlbird, Torcrab, Coralhorn and friends) therefore can't be fetched the usual way; their rows are labelled (expedition-only) and a cold spawn fails with a clear message. To stock them, write expedition <species> into BepInEx/config/ck_cmd.txt: CompanionKit takes you through the loading screen and back, and from then on that creature spawns like any other.

Troubleshooting

Compatibility

Outward must be on its Mono Steam beta branch, not the default IL2CPP build (Properties → Betas → select mono). If the game runs but no BepInEx mods load and there's no crash log, this is almost always why.

For modders

SpawnKit is also a library. Reference it and declare the dependency:

[BepInDependency(SpawnKit.Plugin.GUID)]

Then spawning is one line:

SpawnHandle h = Spawner.Spawn("Hyena");

Everything else is optional — per-spawn customization rides a SpawnOptions, and the returned SpawnHandle is your window onto the creature's lifecycle:

Spawner.Spawn("Alpha Tuanosaur",
    new SpawnOptions
    {
        Faction = Character.Factions.Tuanosaurs, // null = the donor's own faction
        Distance = 12f,                          // ring-probe radius (clamped 1–50m)
        // Position = somewhereExact,            // skip the ring probe entirely
        LifetimeSeconds = 120f,                  // auto-despawn clock (null = forever)
        Corpse = Core.CorpsePolicy.NoBody,       // destroy the corpse after death (null = the
                                                 //   [Spawner] DefaultCorpsePolicy config;
                                                 //   NoBody takes the LOOT with it — see traps)
        CorpseLingerSeconds = 8f,                // death-anim time before the NoBody destroy
        OwnerTag = "mymod",                      // namespace your spawns (see DespawnAll)
        // StripQuestEvents = false,             // default true — leave it unless you KNOW
    },
    onReady: handle =>
    {
        if (!handle.IsAlive) { /* handle.FailReason says why */ return; }
        handle.OnDied += _ => DropReward();
        handle.OnDespawned += _ => CleanupMarker();
    });

The full surface (SpawnKit.Spawner, all static):

Trap table — read before shipping on this

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE. You may use, modify, and redistribute this kit (including in commercial mods) provided you keep the copyright/license notice; see the license text for the full terms.

SpawnKit changelog

0.4.2 — 2026-08-02

• DangerousRoads 0.1.1 + SpawnKit 0.4.2: re-pin off CompanionKit 0.4.2
• DonorKit/SpawnKit: name the two silent paths
• DonorKit/SpawnKit: five static-analysis fixes
• DonorKit/SpawnKit cleanup: one rig gate, one Safe() reader
• Docs sweep: archive, condense, and validate the whole documentation tree

0.4.1 — 2026-08-02

• Hyena/Pearlbird tuning wave: HAO taunt, gifts, bone relic, feed rule