Nektulos/lavastorm & min_expansions
 

I recently made my own server to mess around with and I decided to cap it at Velious using the World:Expansion and Expansion:CurrentExpansion settings under the db rule_values table.

That seemed to work well enough, but then I noticed a few zones, namely Nektulos & Lavastorm, wouldn't spawn anything. Not one NPC anywhere. When I looked in the DB I saw that all of the npcs for those zones were marked as 10 and 9 respectively under the min_expansion field (inside the spawn2 table)

I'm not really clear why this was done but I thought it must be some kind of error, so I'm reporting it. It's also rather a mess to filter in-era mobs from the others so at least on my server for now I'm just leaving them all on min_expansion 0, which sure enough did cause them to all spawn correctly.

That's the expansion at which time those zones "revamps" happened, so the spawns in the database are relative to the expansion when they were revamped. This is especially true with lavastorm, since the spawns get pushed way off the map if you use the original map/zone layout.