Living Survivors (bots)

1.4.0
3 November 2026
Areas
23 changes in this update

Added

12 changes
AI & Wildlife
  • Survivor economy - AI survivors now live like players: they carry a real inventory, gather ore rocks and wood with real tools that wear out, loot crates, sacks, corpses and airdrops, craft with real blueprints and durations (at their own workbench when the recipe needs one), and drop their real gear when they die

  • Survivor careers - each survivor follows a career ladder (tools, weapon, ammo, armor, a base, explosive charges) and picks its next goal from what it needs

  • Survivor bases - survivors build a hut with real pieces and real costs, store what they don't need in their own box, fetch what they need, craft at their bench, respawn at their base and walk through their doors; huts differ from one survivor to the next (1 to 3 rooms, wings, towers with stairs, barred windows)

  • Survivor raids - survivors raid bases with real explosive charges: they break an exterior door first, step back, blast through the opening, loot and go home. Bot bases can be raided any time, player bases only while their owner or a door guest is online

  • Persistent survivors - survivor identities are saved in the world save, so the same survivors come back after a restart; their bodies only exist near players and the rest of the world is simulated cheaply (rl_bot_offline_rate)

  • Offline pause - when nobody is connected the survivors stop living

  • Legacy spawns - crates and mutants use the Legacy server spawn points, and wildlife and resource nodes come from the 30 Legacy wildlife spawner pockets

  • Server settings - rl_mob_scale and rl_wildlife_scale scale the number of mutants and animals

Admin
  • Bots tab - the BOTS tab is rebuilt: list sorted by live distance, detail panel, a world overlay with beacons, LABELS and BEAMS kept per player

  • Follow - FOLLOW a bot, a player or a sleeper with the camera

  • Bot AI debug view - see what a survivor is doing and why

  • rl_play_bots - status of survivors, bases and raids from the console; rl_bot_build and rl_bot_raid to test them

Improved

7 changes
AI & Wildlife
  • Survivors on the road - more survivors travel the island, run on long trips, and about a quarter of them camp at their base; unarmed survivors flee, others fight and hunt

  • Survivor spawns - a survivor never spawns right next to a player, and spawn points with a living survivor are skipped when another is free

Admin
  • Fly mode - no longer drifts down while flying

  • Admin toggles - saved per player

Multiplayer
  • Activity log - sleeper kills are logged on the server

  • Hosting guide - every server setting, startup option and console command is documented

Inventory & UI
  • Inventory UI and activity log refreshed, radiation zones tweaked

Fixed

4 changes
AI & Wildlife
  • Crash when the scene model doesn't exist yet - fixed a NullReferenceException in body and animal sequences

  • Career progress - no longer throws

Player & Survival
  • Offline starvation - a disconnected player's body is removed and life stats are kept across sessions, so you no longer starve while logged out

Combat & Weapons
  • Damage without inventory - fixed a NullReferenceException in TakeDamage when the inventory component is missing