Making plugin to help populate servers

[TimFS]

LivingWorld

LivingWorld - Populate your Rust server with AI that farms, builds, teams, and raids like real players. Empty servers die. Yours won't.

 

AI players that actually play. They farm, they build, they team up, they raid. They run Oil Rig and they'll fight you for it. Drop LivingWorld on a fresh wipe and your server looks alive from minute one - because to anyone connecting, it is.

No waypoint zombies. No standing targets. Just players who happen not to be people.

 

⛮Foundation decisions

Framework: Carbon, not Oxide. It uses dynamic hooking rather than physically patching server DLLs, and is near-100% compatible with Oxide plugins in 2026. For a plugin this hook-heavy and CPU-heavy.

Configuration

 

Everything is in one JSON file, grouped by area.

General enable/disable, name prefix and suffix, `/who` tag, chat prefix, spawn logging.

 

Population  max bots, minimum when the server is empty, per-in-game-hour targets (the

"more bots at your dead hours" curve), the share cap, spawn distance band from real players,

respawn delay range, how fast the director ramps.

 

Behaviour gathering, metabolism, night behaviour, looting, wander radius, walk/run/sprint speeds.

 

Combat  who bots may attack, damage multipliers in both directions, instant-death vs wounded,

weapon effects, target memory.

 

Navigation  grid cell size, max walkable slope, road preference and cost multiplier, disk cache,

A* node ceiling, queue depth, bake rate.

 

Performance LOD radii, tick rate per tier, bucket count, network culling, frame budget warning.

 

Progression - tie loadouts to wipe age or pin a tier; the tier list itself (name, unlock hour,

belt/wear/main items as `shortname:amount`, which difficulty profile it uses).

 

Difficulty profiles `Naked`, `Roamer`, `Zerg` out of the box. Reaction delay range, aim cone

start/end and how long it takes to tighten, recoil factor, burst length and pauses, sight range,

FOV, hearing range, flee threshold, reposition chance, speed scale, aggression. Add your own by

adding a key; reference it from a progression tier.

 

Name pool leave empty for the built-in pool, or supply your own list.

Population guard (ToS)

 

Everything that keeps bots out of the number a server browser sees.

Bots are removed from BasePlayer.activePlayerList, which is what vanilla and every population reporter counts. They remain fully networked entities.

 

Progression

Phase 0 / Bot core - started

Phase 1 / Farming & progression.

Phase 2 / Building. JSON base blueprints (prefab + offset + rotation + grade)

Phase 3 /  PvP. This is where you win or lose on "feels like a real player."

Phase 4 / Teams & social. Use Rust's actual RelationshipManager so bot teams show in the team UI and on the map. Roles within a team (farmer, builder, roamer). Chat via context-triggered phrase pools keyed to events

Update Log

- tba- 

 

Media:

[Coming Soon]

Edited 4 hours ago by TimFS