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Encounters

When and where enemies find you on the road.

How often

Atlas → Settings → Random encounters: Off, Low, Normal or High.

• At Normal, crossing a wilderness hex usually means a fight. High is busier, Low gives you room to breathe, and Off turns random encounters off (bounty fights still happen).
• Harsher biomes are more dangerous. Volcanic wasteland and jungle see far more fights than green plains.
• After a fight, you get a short stretch of road before the next one can find you.
• No enemies, no encounters. A world needs enemies before anything can attack.

Where

In the wilderness, these enemies can find you:

• enemies set to the biome you're crossing
• enemies set to the region you're in
• enemies with no biomes or areas at all, which roam everywhere outside towns

In towns (inside a settlement, or close to buildings), only enemies you've placed there can appear: enemies whose Areas include that settlement, a district in it, or its region. A town nobody has placed enemies in is safe.

When

Enemies can be set to appear at any time, only by day, or only at night (evening and night).

Which enemy

Enemies close to your level are much more likely to turn up than ones far above or below you. If an enemy has variants, one of them sometimes appears in its place. See Creating enemies.

Scaling

An enemy's level is a minimum. When you out-level it, it grows stronger with you, up to twice its original strength, so even early enemies stay a little dangerous.

The battle backdrop

Fights in town use the settlement's picture as the backdrop. Out in the wild, it's the landscape of the biome you're in.

Bounty fights

Bounty markers from the Bounty Board are separate from random encounters. They're always there until you defeat them, even with encounters turned off. See Quests.