Not that it justifies Lemmy going out of his way to poach modders that eat his lunch, but Knox Event Expanded is by far the most refined NPC mod on a technical level and already surpassed Aiteron's work on Project Humanoid from years ago. Him wasting time on making fishing slower stings a little less with that in mind.

People also fluff up Week One as the go-to for NPCs, but it's a complete mess of shit slapped into the game for action's sake (nukes, plane crashes, constant bombings) so Knox Event Expanded is the only viable option for B42 play with NPCs. (Super(b)) Survivors was even worse than Week One and had no serious balancing, memory leaks, bloated gb-size save files and far more crashes. Arguably, KEE has even surpassed TIS' own NPC implementations, or at least what they've shown us: vanilla supports around 500 according to demos from a few years ago, KEE supports higher numbers. They also can defend themselves consistently, even against sprinters, and will for the most part subsist on their own indefinitely (or until they kill each other or starve to death when all the food is gone months later).

Above all else, the dev has no interest in taking a temp contract buyoff to do boring shit in exchange for stopping work on his passion project. It's going to be sweet like honeysuckle watching 3.0 release during B42's update drought, suddenly all the features they spent ten years internally developing aren't going to be so impressive anymore. Imagine the melty if/when we see an official NPC release... and it's literally inferior to a mod by the time it comes out. I hope he makes a patreon sometime because I'd rather fund HIS livelihood and work than Lemmy's