Have you ever tried to mod a quest that uses the THIF or SABT commands? I did, a while back, and I found there's all sorts of problems. Neither of those two codes will work with anything but the "explore" CONDITION. Put any other trigger on the quest, and it'll never take an item from you. There's some other weirdness specific to those codes as well, like THIF needing to be in the first PAGE, and it parses haveitem differently then it should. Point being, all the codes pertaining to Esmerelda are really wonky, and only reliably work in the specific scenarios used in the maingame. Stray far from the example, and it'll break.
So, after much tinkering and testing, I've come to the conclusion that MERC has similar restrictions. The problem isn't your code, it's the the very coding of the game itself.
As near as I can tell, the MERC command doesn't work with CONDITION TYPE uvar. (It may just be that CONDITION uvar evaluates after the point where the game needs to already have launched the special MERC hiring window and protocol.)
I draw this conclusion most based on these two observations:
- If I change all your MERC entries to ALLY, it generates the ship in every scenario and combination.
- If I change all your ALLY entries to MERC, it never generates a ship.
I'll go add that to the big debugging list at the wiki.
So, your possible choices for the mod under discussion seem to be:
- Revert to the default quest without modding it, since it works.
- Remove the CONDITION TYPE uvar, and set them all to MERC.
- Set that one MERC to ALLY instead, but keep the uvar CONDITION and use alternate text to hint that he's an outlaw.
- Move the MERC code to the first PAGE, and test to see if that works. I doubt it will, but given how weird the THIF and SABT codes are, I can rule it out till it's been tested.
- Surprise me with something clever, new and fun that's not on this list.
Sorry it took so long for me to figure out the problem. It wasn't till this morning that I thought far enough outside the box to realize the issue might not be your coding. The past couple days, I'd been looking for a typo that didn't exist.
One more thing. I found this other possible bug (depending on how you view it, you might see it as a feature) in the mod. Wormhate overrides the Mantle of Babulon. I had the mantle and met the Muktians. They gave me the "cruel Slorn" speech, like we were gonna fight. Then they gave me the "return of the ancient ones! We exude ooze in jubilation" greeting in a second window. Then they attacked me. You might want to go tweak mantle_muk to make it less surreal.