Barber

Commentary

I'm pretty happy with Barbers as-is - for a small bonus that was basically an afterthought on Zeekerss' part, they were definitely one of the most memorable additions in v55. And that's in spite of the same update transforming the metagame with the Company Cruiser!

My biggest gripe with them is their extreme rarity - they were originally intended to spawn in pairs in v55, and I suspect Zeekerss 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 spawn chance adjustments to compensate.

Additionally, Barbers have this really cool social behavior implemented, where the first one to spawn (the "master") controls the tempo of all Barbers that spawn afterwards - stunning the master stuns all its followers! Unfortunately, in vanilla, some bugs prevent that behavior from working as intended, causing silent sliding Barbers. 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 Vent Spawn Fix 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. Having a small army of them patrolling the map makes it completely uninhabitable.

I think the best way to address this issue is a happy medium between Zeekerss' intent and final execution - Barbers populating factories and manors as they were originally intended 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.