Hostile Takeover

Hostile Takeover

Taking over an NPC grid should feel like an accomplishment — not a scavenger hunt. Hostile Takeover makes the process deliberate: pull out your grinder near an NPC grid and the blocks you actually need to destroy will highlight themselves, walking you through the takeover category by category.

This is a ground-up rewrite of the original mod. Same concept, completely rebuilt engine.

How It Works

NPC grids have four categories of important blocks. Highlights appear in priority order while you're grinding:

• Control — cockpits, remote controls, flight seats
• Medical — cryo chambers, medical rooms, survival kits
• Weapon — turrets and combat systems
• Trap — warheads

Clear the Control blocks and the highlights shift to Medical. Clear that and Weapons light up. It guides you through. No more grinding half the ship hoping you hit the right thing.

Once all important blocks are gone, the grid is yours.

No Cheesing

Repairing a block on an NPC grid hands it straight back to them. Welding new blocks onto their hull? Also theirs. The grid doesn't flip until you've actually earned it.

Settings

This version introduces a full configuration system. A config file is written to your save folder on first load — no manual setup required. Key options:

• Highlight mode — single nearest block, all blocks at once, nearest in the active group, or tier-gated (better grinders reveal more targets simultaneously)
• Highlight colors — independent color per block category, fully customizable
• Detection range — how far out the grinder scans for nearby NPC grids
• Category toggles — opt Medical, Weapon, or Trap groups out of the priority chain entirely if you want a simpler experience
• Allow Player Hacking — if you want players to be able to keep hacked blocks, that switch exists
• Mirror Easy NPC Takeovers — see compatibility below

Block classification is also user-configurable. A BlockClassification.xml is written each session so you can see exactly how every block got categorized. A BlockClassificationOverrides.xml lets you add or exclude specific blocks from any category without touching the mod files.

Performance

Block classification happens once at session load from game definitions — not at runtime per block. Grid tracking uses deferred tick-based processing rather than spiking on grid spawn. The steady-state action queue during normal gameplay sits at effectively zero. It runs clean, including on dedicated servers.

Compatibility

Hacking Computer — doesn't accomplish much here. The moment a hacking computer is placed on an NPC grid, the grid reclaims it. You're welcome to try.

Easy NPC Takeovers — Hostile Takeover is the spiritual replacement for Easy NPC Takeovers. If you're migrating from that mod, enable MirrorEasyNpcTakeovers in the config to get comparable behavior as a baseline.

WeaponCore / AI Enabled — modded weapons from these frameworks are detected and classified automatically when the mods are present.

Other takeover mods will likely conflict. Running two mods that both want to own NPC grids is going to cause a bad time.

Bugs / Feedback

Testing was thorough but this is Space Engineers — something will eventually do something weird. Drop it in the comments and we'll take a look.

Contact

Questions, comments, concerns can be directed here on the workshop page, or find me in the EEM Discord: https://discord.gg/PNtpMyw

License

Until I say otherwise, Hostile Takeover is not allowed to be used in whole or in part in another mod upload, or reuploaded with customized changes.