Question: RespawnShips.sbc acting up on DS

Hi all. Hoping someone here can help. So many threads on DS here & I know nothing about servers, so apologies if I'm asking a question that's already been answered somewhere. This is a minefield to me.

Anyway, I recently got a report from one of my workshop subscribers that one of my mods is behaving strangely on his DS. I'm trying to help the guy but I don't know enough about how mods are handled host-to-client. I'm pretty sure I know what's happening - I just don't know why or how to fix it.

Here is the mod...
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1306826358

It's a very simple Respawn Ship replacer. Nothing special about it - just a new RespawnShips.sbc file and a handful of prefab assets.
All it does is to add the <ShipEnabled=false> flag to each of the vanilla Respawn Ship references (to disable them) and to add a few new references.

I know for a fact that the mod works as intended in SP games and I've had no other reports of it doing anything strange in MP, so I'm thinking there's an admin setting that my subber is overlooking.

What's happening is that the modded RespawnShips.sbc file is being read as normal, the new ships appear in the Respawn menu - but the vanilla ships are not being disabled in the list.

This leads me to think that the vanilla RespawnShips.sbc file is being read again *after* the modded file - and is effectively undoing the <ShipEnabled=false> flag.

My first thought was that the vanilla file was being read for a second time on the client-end, so I suggested installing the mod on the client machine as well. Apparently this makes no difference though.

Is my subber doing something wrong? Is there a config setting he needs to change? Is there a bug that would cause this? Is my mod broken somehow?

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

I wonder of another mod is overwriting the SBC. maybe have him change the load order of the mods...

 

@Burstar... Thanks for replying.

That was one of my first questions to him. There were 4 other mods in play - all block & resource mods. No other Respawn Ship mods & nothing else that'd directly alter the RespawnShips.sbc file.

As far as I'm aware, load order shouldn't be an issue with my mod, as long as it's not run alongside other mods that affect the RespawnShips.sbc.
But then pretty much any mod that does affect that file wont be compatible with mine anyway unless I patch it in, so if another mod was overriding mine, changing the load order wouldn't stop it.

After some back & forth it emerged that one of the mods was a tech tree mod.
Now I have no idea what files a thing like that would change or how it'd work but something that complex strikes me as something that could reek a lot of havok, especially in an MP game.
He uninstalled it but something went wrong & some of the changes it made ended up baked into the world file, effectively corrupting it.
I have to wonder if the tech tree mod hadn't already corrupted the file long before it was uninstalled & if that's what was causing the problem with my mod.

He's re-starting the server with a fresh world file, so I'm currently waiting to hear if that fixes the problem.

If not I guess I'll be back...