Mandatory POTCAR for screening purposes?

I am working with DockonSurf to screen potential adsorption configurations (example: small organic molecule adsorbed on a metal surface) It seems that the presence/absence of the POTCAR directory affects the generation of the adsorption configurations, i.e., for some systems, if I provide the POTCAR directory we get several geometries, while if I set 'potcar_dir = False', DockonSurf does not provide configurations at all. Therefore, my question is: Is the presence of POTCARs affecting the screening workflow (i.e., the generation of the POSCARs)? Is there a way to generate the POSCARs without providing the POTCAR directory?

Thanks in advance for the response.