i figured it out
I had other pony player models that were clashing with the ppm/2
Unsubscribing from these seemed to fix the issue, finally

which one are you using?
some of them do not like to work in singleplayer,
to get around this, you need to set max players to at least 2 before starting

Having issues where the pony I made only works in a server but not when I play singleplayer. Been trying to troubleshoot this for two weeks to no avail.