NPC Favor – Living Neighborhood Mod V1.3

Breathe life into your farmland! This mod adds a living, breathing community of NPC (Non-Player Character) neighbors to Farming Simulator 25. They work their own fields, follow daily schedules, and will eventually ask you for favors, creating a dynamic layer of social simulation and small tasks alongside your main farming operations.
✨ Features Living NPCs: AI-controlled neighbor farmers populate your map, with unique names, personalities, and homes. Daily Schedules: They follow a realistic day/night cycle—working fields by day, heading home at night. Relationship System: Build friendship (0-100) with each NPC through interaction and completing favors. Favor System: Neighbors will ask for help with tasks like borrowing equipment, transporting goods, or helping with harvests. Simple Interaction: Walk up to any NPC and press E to talk, check relationships, or manage active favors. Customizable: Control the number of NPCs, their work hours, how often they ask for favors, and more via settings. Lightweight: Designed to run efficiently in the background without impacting game performance.
🎮 How to Use / In-Game Guide
Once the mod is active in your savegame:
Find NPCs: Look for named markers or characters (currently debug spheres) near houses and fields. Interact: Walk close to an NPC. A hint will appear. Press E to open the dialog menu. Build Relationships: Talk to them regularly. Higher friendship unlocks more interaction options. Complete Favors: When you get a notification that an NPC needs help, talk to them. Accept the favor, complete the objective before the timer runs out, and claim your reward (cash + relationship boost). Manage: Type npcHelp into the in-game console (~ or key) for a list of useful debug commands likenpcStatusornpcSpawn`.
The mod creates a settings file in your savegame folder: savegameX/npc_favor_settings.xml. You can edit this file directly to change:
maxNPCs: Maximum number of active NPCs. npcWorkStart / npcWorkEnd: Their working hours (0-23). showNames: Toggle names above NPC heads. debugMode: Enable visual debug info and paths.
– Multiplayer: neighbours stand where the server says, show their real names and personalities on every player’s screen, and every button (talk, offer help, accept, complete, abandon) acts through the host on the exact person and job shown, by the player who pressed it. – Saved neighbours stay the same people after a reload, with their homes, trust and work, and a saved favour keeps its remaining destinations. – Neighbours work land they are actually allowed to work, and are no longer thrown off a field the farmer owns over and over. They work the whole field and stay on it, and a neighbour inspecting a field’s edges follows the field’s real shape. – An expiring favour no longer deletes a different, still valid favour, and accepted favours survive a deleted or reused farm: orphaned ones appear in the favour menu’s Recovery view. – A favour number used before a save is never reused after loading. – The NPC Favor menu key no longer collides with Dashboard Live’s map orientation, the favours HUD key is registered, keyboard defaults are bound, and the interact key shows the live key. – Translations: the page legend shows a plain dot between page names, and the title and description read correctly in the mod manager in nine languages.
– The NPC Favor page on the Realistic Farming Esc menu: scrollable tables with a details card for each neighbour. – A favours HUD show/hide toggle in the Control Center, Control Center actions, and a HUD that follows the base game’s theme and can be resized in width. – Experimental (off by default): an Experimental Systems switch saved with the game, and the first groundwork for companion mods to bring their own neighbours and jobs (offered to one farm, finished face to face, paid once, saved with the game, and free to let go). No companion mod uses it yet.
V1.2.7.1 – Fixed favors never completing (#62): every favor step within 30m of its target called a method that did not exist, throwing a Lua error on each check so no favor could progress. The borrow-tractor favor, for example, handed over the keys and then did nothing at the field marker. Step completion now flashes on the favor HUD and favors finish normally. – Favors now pay the farm that accepted them, stamped at accept time and applied at every money site, so the correct farm is paid even on a dedicated server and clients never apply money locally. – Favor completion, loan repayment, and gifts all route through the mod’s own server-authoritative event. – Idempotency flags (persisted) so a reload can no longer double-pay a favor, and a live double-payout in the favor management dialog is fixed. – Bridges onto the four core services when installed (StateLedger, NetworkSync, MasterHUD, SettingsHub), with the mod’s own paths kept as the standalone fallback. – A read-only relationship and favor API for Dairy Core and Pro Staff.
V1.2.7.0 NPC FIELD WORK (NEW) – Real base-game AI tillage: an NPC’s tractor and implement runs a genuine field-work job and actually tills the ground. – Full job-to-field matching: each NPC gets a role and the matching gear – till (tractor + plow/cultivator), sow (tractor + seeder), or harvest (combine + header). The AI job only runs when the field state matches. – Crop safety: NPCs read the field’s real crop and growth state and never plow or cut a growing crop. Harvesters only go to fields that are ripe. – Fallbacks: if the game AI cannot run (no implement, hire limit reached), the NPC drives its combo with base-game pathfinding or a visual pass, so it always looks busy without errors.
ON-DEMAND EQUIPMENT – Equipment now spawns on demand at the field edge the moment an NPC starts working, matched to the field’s current need, and despawns when they stop. This removes stale gear (like a plow left on a field that had since grown a crop). A growing field simply gets no equipment and the NPC visits on foot. – If an NPC leaves work while their vehicle is still loading, the load is cancelled before the implement spawns, so nothing is created just to be deleted.
FIXES – Fixed a VehicleCharacter crash from a wrong argument order. – Fixed 5 no-op vehicle deletions that left stranded units behind. – Fixed a map-marker overlay render flood (“Unknown entity id …”) by sharing one overlay across all NPC markers. – Fixed harvester headers never attaching (the New Holland combo pointed at a header as its combine, so two headers were paired). It now uses the real combine and the header attaches and harvests. – Silenced the “Can’t change money of spectator farm” log spam: NPC AI job cost is zeroed, NPC vehicles keep their fuel topped, and Worker Costs (when installed) drops any charge aimed at the spectator farm.
AI BEHAVIOUR, MULTIPLAYER, EDGE CASES – Added the “loner” personality to the daily schedule. – Schedule-aware commute speed boost so NPCs running late move quicker at any time of day, not just the evening. – Group gatherings now show a speech bubble even with no partner nearby. – Reduced NPC-to-NPC social pairing distance to 50m for more natural pairing. – Preserved mood-based movement speed correctly across walk and run modes. – Cleared stale gathering data when an NPC sleeps, and unified scheduled activity lookups into one code path. – Client-side orphan-vehicle cleanup in multiplayer, so stranded NPC vehicles are removed on clients too.
NEW CONSOLE COMMAND – npcDeleteVehicle : delete the nearest vehicle/implement to you (cleanup for stranded units). Never deletes the vehicle you are in.
V1.2.6.0 If you run Soil & Fertilizer alongside NPCFavor, neighbour fields used to be a problem: nobody manages their soil, so under the simulation their yields would crater and an NPC harvest favor could become impossible to complete.
This release fixes that. NPCFavor now tells FieldSentry when a field is under an active favor, so that field is left out of the soil simulation while you work it — the harvest gets normal yields and the favor stays completable. The better your relationship with a neighbour, the more the integration trusts you: with a close friend the field stays in the simulation so you can actually prepare and benefit from managing it, while a hostile neighbour’s field is simply masked for a plain vanilla harvest.
Works on host and single player, syncs to clients through Soil & Fertilizer, and NPCFavor runs exactly as before if you do not have Soil & Fertilizer installed. Pairs with Soil & Fertilizer v2.4.2.9 or newer.
HUD edit mode key binding now works while in a vehicle (vehicle guard removed) RMB exits edit mode only — never used to enter (matches SoilFertilizer standard) Fixes edit mode being practically inaccessible since most play time is in vehicles
V1.2.5.2 Synced all translation files Updated the German translation (not native)
What’s new in v1.2.5.0
This release covers everything since v1.2.2.5 — two major development cycles worth of work. 🗓️ NPC Schedule Board (new in 1.2.5.0)
Click Ask about work on any neighbor and you’ll see what they’re doing right now (marked ← NOW) plus their next two planned activities. Finally know when to catch Old MacDonald at the barn instead of hiking out there to find him gone. 🎁 Gift Selection — 3 tiers (new in 1.2.5.0)
Give Gift now opens a choice panel instead of silently spending $500:
🌱 Small Gift — $200 · +2 relationship 🎁 Standard Gift — $500 · +5 relationship 💐 Generous Gift — $1,000 · +10 relationship
Gifts now correctly deduct money from your farm account. (They were accidentally free before — that’s fixed.) ⚙️ Custom Settings Panel — F5 (new in 1.2.4.0)
The NPC settings are no longer injected into the ESC menu. Press F5 to open a purpose-built settings panel with three full categories (Behavior, Display, Gameplay), section headers, descriptions for every setting, and an admin control panel. Much cleaner. 🧠 NPC Roles Now Actually Matter (new in 1.2.4.0)
Farmers, shopkeepers, and workers now follow different daily schedule templates and lean toward different types of favors. Role also feeds into weather-triggered behavior — farmers are the first ones to call for help during a storm. 🌧️ Weather Emergency Favors (new in 1.2.4.0)
When conditions get severe, an affected NPC can now reach out with an urgent favor request. The scheduler watches weather severity and fires contextual triggers when thresholds are crossed. 🤝 NPC Memory Shapes Every Interaction (new in 1.2.4.0)
NPCs now track your encounter history and use it. Complete several favors for a neighbor and they’ll warm up to you in dialog. Ignore them repeatedly and they’ll be cooler. The same memory score feeds into which favors they generate and how likely they are to ask at all. 🙋 Offer Help (Player-Initiated Favors) (new in 1.2.4.0)
You can now walk up to any neutral+ NPC and offer to help before they ask. Personality determines whether they accept — grumpy neighbors are skeptical, generous ones are grateful. Favors accepted this way give a 15% reward bonus. 🎲 Personality-Weighted Favor Generation (new in 1.2.4.0)
Each personality type now steers toward matching favor types when generating requests — hardworking NPCs tend toward field and equipment work, social ones toward deliveries and errands, etc. Less random, more believable. 🔧 Favor System Overhaul (new in 1.2.4.0)
Multiple stuck-favor conditions resolved:
watch_property patrol now closes correctly via dialog Loan repayment step fires reliably Dialog-step guards prevent double-completion Cancel button properly abandons the favor with relationship penalty Favors were sometimes never appearing at all — fixed
💾 Auto-save + Save Schema Versioning (new in 1.2.4.0)
NPC data is now auto-saved every 5 real-world minutes on the server. A schema version constant and migration scaffolding are in place so future format changes won’t silently corrupt saves. 🌍 Backstory Localization (new in 1.2.5.0)
Personality bios shown in the Relationship info panel are now translated across all 10 supported languages: EN, DE, FR, PL, ES, IT, CZ, BR, UK, RU. 🇫🇷 French Translation — native speaker pass (new in 1.2.4.0)
All French strings reviewed and corrected by a native speaker (merci Seb). 🐛 Bug fixes
Relationship decay warning showed garbled format code (%s where a day-count %d was expected) in all non-English languages — fixed across all 10 files setImageColor nil state argument crash on FS25 v1.17 API change — fixed Favors never appearing after favor cooldown redesign — fixed Cancel button was not properly abandoning favors — fixed NPCs were spawning tractor props as map hotspots, filling the minimap — fixed
Save compatibility: Full — no migration needed. Existing saves load as-is.
What’s new in 1.2.4.0
Companion mod detection — NPCFavor now detects FS25_RandomWorldEvents and FS25_MarketDynamics when they are installed.
Context-aware NPC conversation topics — NPCs now reference the world around them during conversation:
When an RWE event is active (market boom, crop failure, disease scare, etc.) NPCs bring it up naturally in conversation When MarketDynamics shows prices significantly above or below baseline, NPCs give market tips Event-aware topics are weighted more heavily so they appear often during active events
No save migration required.
Right-click in a vehicle no longer triggers HUD edit mode — the handler now checks eventUsed before acting, so events already consumed by the vehicle camera are ignored Other mods now correctly receive eventUsed = true when NPC Favor consumes a mouse event (e.g. right-click HUD toggle)
No save migration needed.
V1.2.2.6 !!! THIS IS A TEMPORARY RELEASE! !!!
Since this is a pretty big project, everything takes a lot more time than we first expected. But we still want you to see that we’re actively working on the mod and making progress.
So for now, we’re sharing what we currently have.
Please keep in mind: we *know* there are bugs. We *know* the favors aren’t fully polished yet. Our goal is to make each favor feel meaningful — not just a simple “do this, get that” task. We want it to feel more alive and rewarding.
Thanks so much for your patience and support. We really want to make this mod something great ❤️
V1.2.2.5 – Restored working codebase from v1.2.2.4*
*Im aware that the map is bugged and you get draw errors; You can see the names in the minimap. There will be a fix for this soon!
V1.2.2.4 – Fixed map hotspot night visibility + addded NPC name labels – Improved NPC animations, clothing, field work pathing, and HUD rendering – Fixed settings persistence, expanded ESC menu, fixed dialog/icon ZIP loading – Added temp fix for mapHotspot error
V1.2.2.1 Temp fix for Favor UI*
*Im aware the buttons and text are way off, it should work for completing the favor. However on final i did notice when completing it doesnt give you the reward.
Original Idea: Lion2008 Implementation & Coding: TisonK
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