Crew Scaling

Co-op rebalance for Schedule I. It stops a 2–4 player crew from racing through progression. Each milestone takes more work, the cartel and police push back harder, and the world can absorb more product, all scaled by a fixed crew size stored in your save.

This is the Mono build for the alternate / alternate-beta Steam branch. On the default branch, install CrewScaling instead. Never install both.

Why

In vanilla co-op, every player sells, grows and deals in parallel on shared in-game days. Four players reach each rank, customer, region and the cartel endgame several times faster than one, then run out of things to do. Raising prices doesn't fix that, because money isn't the real progression gate. This mod slows the actual gates instead, and gives the extra players more pressure to deal with.

Features

At crew size 4, compared with solo:

Two settings are 1.4× / 1.8× at crew size 2 / 3. Everything is tunable per system.

It also fixes two vanilla co-op bugs that inflated progression:

• every new customer reduced cartel influence once per connected player;
• a sample handed over by a non-host player could grant its XP twice.

Not changed: wages, day length, deal time windows, product sale prices.

Installation

1. Install MelonLoader 0.7.3 (0.7.2 or later works; avoid 0.7.1). Run the game once.
2. Mod manager: install with r2modman, Gale or the Thunderstore app. Manually: put the DLL into Schedule I/Mods/.
3. Every player in the lobby needs the mod. Some values (your own purchase prices, police escalation when you're chased, the laundering limit, the XP bar) are calculated on each player's own PC. Friends need no configuration: the crew size and all settings come from the host.

Setting your crew size

The crew size is stored inside the save. It never changes when people join or leave, so a friend logging off doesn't make anything cheaper and an absent friend doesn't punish the group.

• The host sets DefaultCrewSize (1–4) in UserData/MelonPreferences.cfg before first loading a save with the mod. The save keeps that value from then on.
• To change an existing save: set OverrideCrewSize to 1–4, load the save as host, then set it back to 0.
• Crew size 1 = vanilla. The mod steps aside completely. The default is 1, so nothing changes until you set it. The tutorial is never scaled.

Configuration

UserData/MelonPreferences.cfg; only the host's settings matter:

[CrewScaling]
Enabled = true
DefaultCrewSize = 1      # crew size for saves that don't have one yet
OverrideCrewSize = 0     # 1-4 = force onto the next save the host loads
DebugLog = false         # log every scaled value

[CrewScaling_Systems]
# every system has <Name>_Enabled and <Name>_K; multiplier = 1 + K * (CrewSize - 1)
RankXp_K = 0.4
CustomerUnlocks_K = 0.4
CartelInfluence_K = 0.28
CartelQuota_K = 0.5
AmbushFrequency_K = 0.28
AmbushSize_K = 0.3
PolicePressure_K = 0.25
DealVolume_K = 0.5
Laundering_K = 0.75
SupplierLimits_K = 0.75
Prices_K = 0.05

Known limits

• Ambushes: at most 5 goons (the game has only 5); extra goons fight unarmed.
• Fixed by the game: the dealer customer cap (10), delivery vehicle capacity and one order window per customer per day.
• Signs: for-sale and vehicle signs show the vanilla price, but you pay the price shown in the dialogue.
• Removing the mod keeps your rank, but the save's stored crew size is dropped at the next save.

Compatibility

Built for Schedule I 0.4.7 and MelonLoader 0.7.3. It patches levelling, customers, cartel, police, laundering, suppliers and shop prices, so it may conflict with mods that change the same systems.