For those interested in this mod, here's the current state:

The mod is either broken due to lack of updates, or the design was flawed from the beginning. Despite encountering numerous vagrant camps, almost none of the persons at these camps are recruitable, barring the rough average of one person per camp. To make matters worse, there are hidden stat requirements, or quite possibly, just a hidden dice roll that you need to recruit that one person.

Fail to meet those conditions or that dice roll, and your recruitment request is rejected outright, meaning the entire camp essentially becomes just a place to chill, but otherwise in no way able to fulfill your intended goal of recruiting people without use of force.

Really, this mod needs someone to pick it up and reconfigure things before it can really do as it was meant to, so if anyone out there happens upon this mod with modding experience, this is your chance to do a solid and fix this, as the state it's in currently isn't great.

If you want some really fun recruitables, try this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2037201436
Warning: You have to be overpowered to recruit the overpowered recruits.
Imagine you are Supergirl and you made a deal with Lex Luthor level of overpowered.

What updates are you looking for? Last time I checked, it still "mostly worked". The merchants in the Vagrant camps/cities worked, only the recruitment system was a bit borked, but might actually be working better now?

someone make an updated version for this

Are the cities set locations or random like camps?

From what I recall, the camps are spawned in the same way as beast nests and bandit camps. You can refresh them by clearing out other types of camps and leaving the area.

There is a fair bit of real estate in which the camps can be found. Check out Skimsands, Hook, and the Unwanted Zone. I've also seen one in Grey Desert.

hmmmm...Can I ask how do the camps refresh?I've searched everywhere in Hook and found nothing...In fact since then I just found one camp in the Great Desert in my two saves.

Dealers should really have a markup on drugs similar to UC cities. They might not have the same amount of cash (as already reflected by their cats) as big city thieves but there's no reason for drugs to sell dirt cheap here.

I've had issues with the recruit dialog working once or twice as intended, then just not working at all. Although I might have had either the Recruit Anyone or a shopping mod installed also, which could have easily caused the problem.

It might be a mod conflict but I'll look into it. I'd say it might be a conflict because other people don't have this problem, but maybe the AI became bugged somehow with the new updates.

I seem to be having an issue where the drifter camps dont function properly. They just stand idly in a group and wont interact. The empire peasant camps work just fine however. Is this a glitch with the mod or perhaps a mod conflict? Thanks

I managed to get Ogres to appear in camps thanks to this mod. My attempt with supermodels was....less successful.

I really like the idea of this mod. I'm looking into how it might apply to modded factions. The idea of "hobo factions" is really interesting to me, for some reason.

yeah i dont blame you man, i know they are using the unreal engine on kenshi 2 but they are working on something to help modding in that regards, so hopefully on the next one more can be done! but great mod none the less man.

I've kind of slowed down on Kenshi modding due to it having some issues I just can't get past (The FCS is really good but a frustrating amount of the cool stuff is hardcoded on account of the devs not owning the engine). Your idea is good though.

dude im not sure if your still an active kenshi modder, but this is a gem of a mod, more mods like this would be great. have you thought of doing similar ones with other smaller (non-city) "factions" in the game?

It was close enough to the UC to make sense that they went there and far enough that it'd make sense people wanting to not deal with the UC might live there.

I have to ask, why the Unwanted Zone?

Good idea

may i suggest adding some vagrants to the border zone? since it is a land constantly at war and the hub is in tatters it makes sense that many people here would loose their home.

@Squamousness Thank you very much for your permission！

Oh no, it's fine! Glad to see people like my mod.

This mod is great, so I translated it into Chinese. Here is the link:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1813805688
If you don't agree, I'll remove it.

Wait no I did but I've changed 2 back to 6, you've got a pretty good argument for it.

That makes sense. I don't think I've actually changed tho lol so it all works out.

@Squamousness - I wouldn't tweak the values at the moment. 40% every 6 hours feels perfect. If you have patience, and are willing to live among them for days on end, you can get free recruits. This feels perfectly balanced to me. You're investing time for the gamble. And it feels realistic that if you hang around for a week you might get like 3 of them who take a shining to you. Occasionally I'll send a character off to the desert, to shack up in one of the camps, helping them fight of skimmers, trying to convince as many as they can to join up. It never gets silly with like 10 new recruits all of a sudden, and gives a nice different feel from hitting the bars and dropping cats to build up a squad of newbies.

No problem, glad you like it. Just be sure to throw a line of credit in there for me if you haven't done that already.

Thank you for this amazing mod that I have included in "Kenshi: The World Divided". This Mod Collection has been fully tested and works perfectly. Thank you again for the great mod to add to this collection. Timesplitter.

I'll figure something out an update the mod later.

Ok then I probably got stupidly unlucky, or maybe I have to leave the camp fully with all my chars for npcs to change their mind in the meantime (cuz I had a guy inside the camp, following the npcs I wanted for a long while, trying to recruit from time to time). Still, I feel like there should be a cost to recruiting them, at least 1.5k cats, they have above average stats than the regular recruits in bars... Or you could give some of them bounties, like about 400ish cats of bounty, enough to not be exploitable or worth doing (you could sell any old npc for that much at slave shops anyway) but to give guards a chance to pick on you for getting poor people in their cities...

Its a flat 40% chance of success with a cooldown of 6 hours. I've changed the cooldown to 2 hours though, that will at least give you more attempts. I'll look into what you suggested for a future update though.

So how low is the chance of recruitment exactly? I'm already at my 16th failed attempt in a row, buggers complain about getting caught smuggling drugs, being hella hungry, etc. but none of them join. What are the conditions? My squad has members with skills in the 40s, tough chance of dying to normal bandits. Any way of adding a payment option to "entice them" to join? It could still be chance based, but have it be a 50% chance for 2k cat payment or like 2 ration packs or something.
Or is it made in a way that a character that refuses once will always refuse? I did try to recruit 4 different characters multiple times after the cooldown was over, and the only time I succeeded I recruited a scorchlander on first try, in the early game.

Empire Peasants are mostly Hivers in general, you'll hear certain nobles complain about you being another Hiver immigrant if you walk by them as a Hiver. There are also newspapers in the United Cities that talk about how Hiver immigration has dramatically increased lately, so this is actually pretty lore friendly.

That seems to be the base game or the other mod's problem. The vagrant faction belongs to the Empire Peasants faction, which is a vanilla faction, and it is that faction that sets population ratios. I haven't changed the faction so its not my mod causing it. On the other hand, keep in mind that the hivers that do leave the cities are disproportionately found in the underclass so if a hiver were to live in the UC, it would likely be as a peasant, so you'd see more of them there.

So, not sure if it's an interaction with the Gen Mod, but I'm having a population ratio issue. Well, maybe it's just my opinion about it based on what I know of the game world. We can read in the racial description of Hivers that its rather rare for them to successfully leave the hive without going insane or otherwise from the withdrawal, yet here are all your vagrant cities just FULL of hivers. Like, 70% of any of the peasants to be hivers and then 25% Shek with the last 5% shared between the human subtypes.

Now, don't get me wrong, love me some hard working drones and researcher princes, but these numbers don't seem right.

No problem, glad to know people like my mod.

I have added this mod to my collection "Komrad's Kenshi Kollection" for the great addition to gameplay it provides, thank you to your contribution to this community and for keeping this great game fresh and interesting.

I really like this mod - I've been using it since you released it. It's one of my favorites.

No problem. Its a bit hacky but that's the only way to prevent players from rapidly recruiting the entire camp, since there's no monetary cost to hiring vagrants if I recall correctly.

Oh, well that makes sense. Will keep that in mind. Still a bit odd that no one else will talk to you after just the one, but whatever. Thanks!

Oh, well that might be the six hour delay effect. Try waiting a period of six in-game hours after initially recruiting someone (assuming you managed to do it successfully once) and then try again. Dialogue should resume normally with the person either refusing or accepting the offer.

It's just the peasants when trying to recruit. They refuse, then any other potential subjects seem to lose the option to talk to them. The dealers seem to work fine. Love the mod though! Even if recruitment seems a bit buggy at the moment.

I wasn't aware that was happening, thanks for letting me know. I'll look into it.

So I had a peasant come up to me asking for work, asked if he wanted to join up, then he suddenly went back to sit down without any further dialog and I couldn't talk to any of the other peasants. If this is a compatability issue with the recent update to the game, then I can wait.

I would love to do that but I am currently unsure if it is a possibility. If it is I will implement it as soon as I am able.

Totally grabbing this mod just now but I'm wondering if its possible to have a (small) % chance for a vagrant to be spawned with a missing limb just to add variety.
From my experience so far there have been few if any NPCs that are missing limbs and it would be a nice touch given the fact that they themselves are the riff-raff of society and frequently endure hardship.

Well the thing about nests is that they are randomly generated, so I can't really make sure that one spawns right outside town, as far as I know. As for building your own, there are many mods that let you build tents out right now. I gave dealers fabric for this precise reason, so you can use it to build your own outlaw encampment.

This is such a great idea!!! I hope you will keep expanding on this concept cause honestly the idea of outlaw towns is great. Did you consider adding some camps outside some city walls or even building our own?

nice one thanks gonna try it out soon

@abquintess the feature you requested was added