Fleet Variance - TheGiraffe3/Endless-Sky-Creators-Handbook GitHub Wiki

A common point of confusion for newer creators is the use of variants in fleet, how do they work exactly?

It's actually a simple process that is explained plainly in the official wiki, but still catches up some creators. Anyone reading this would presumably be experienced enough to have dealt with fleet variants before, or had at least the knowledge from the official wiki to dive into it without issue.

The chance for any single variant to be spawned is variant weight / sum of all variant weights. For example, if a variant has a weight of 4 and the sum of all variant weights in the fleet is 20, then that variant has a 4/20 chance of being spawned.

If no weight is given for the variant (or no count for a ship model), then the weight (or count) is 1.

This page will be short as my rule of thumb is simple, employ intuitive fractioning. For each fleet you define as an original (as in not overriding another), try to keep the sum of all variant weights at a decimal magnitude.

10 for 10% chance increments
100 for 1% chance increments
...

100 is as far as anyone would typically go unless they are particularly obsessive.