Behaviour

A bot is a mannequin with its own tick. Once it exists it thinks once per tick, on the entity's own scheduler, and everything below happens without anybody touching a menu.

Attack and Follow

Two switches decide what a bot does with its tick. Both are on by default, and both live in the advanced menu.

Turning Attack off gives you a moving target that hits back at nothing. Turning Follow off gives you a punching bag that stays exactly where you left it. Turning both off gives you a statue that heals itself.

When it decides to fight

A bot engages when all three of these are true:

• Attack is on.
• Its target is within the engage distance, 26 blocks.
• Its target is not in spectator mode.

Until then it is idle, and idle is not nothing:

• It keeps up with you when Follow is on and you are further away than the follow distance (advanced.movement.follow-distance, 3.0 blocks by default) plus a little slack, so it does not shuffle back and forth on the edge of the band.
• It lowers its shield, stops sneaking, and glances around every second or two.
• If nothing has hit it for five seconds and it is not eating, it heals back to full. A mannequin has no hunger and never regenerates on its own, so without this a practice bot would only ever get weaker.

When you hit it

The shield only blocks while it is genuinely raised. The AI lowers it to swing, so a player who reads the rhythm gets a free hit — that is the whole point of shield timing existing.

If a bot got the last hit on you, your death message is hidden — the server does not announce a bot kill in chat.

The three ways a bot leaves on its own

Each has its own line in messages.yml, and each is measured against whoever the bot is currently fighting rather than the player who paid for it.

Three more removals happen quietly, with no message, because there is nobody left to read one: the target logs out or is kicked, the bot's mannequin stops being a valid entity, and the server shuts down. A bot never survives a restart.

Respawning

A killed bot comes back on its own when respawn.enabled is on, which it is by default.

respawn:
  enabled: true
  delay-seconds: 2.0

You get bot.respawning — "Bot died! Respawning..." — immediately, and bot.respawned when it is back. The respawn is cancelled if you log out in the meantime, and it is skipped if you are no longer in one of the worlds listed under worlds. It also goes through the same spawn path as /bot spawn, so a respawn cannot walk past a server cap that a fresh spawn would have been refused by. See Limits.

Shift right-click

Sneak and right-click your own bot to open its menu. It is on by default and it is one key:

interaction:
  shift-click-opens-menu: true

Only your own bot, only while sneaking. Right-clicking somebody else's bot does nothing, and neither does a plain right-click on yours.

How it moves

The bot steers straight at whatever it is walking to. That is the common case and it costs nothing: a direction, a step up a single block, a jump. Terrain is what breaks it, and terrain is the only thing the grid search under advanced.pathfinding exists for.

The search runs when direct steering has visibly failed — the bot has stopped making progress, or there is a wall in front of it taller than one step — and it produces a short list of checkpoints to walk through instead of the target itself. It is used only when the bot is closing in or following; backing off and circling are never steered by a path towards the person it is backing away from.

A bot also holds the chunk it is standing in open for as long as it exists. An entity only runs its scheduled work while its chunk is ticking, and a bot in a chunk nobody is ticking never applies its gear and never thinks: it stands there naked and still. Keeping its own chunk alive is what stops that, and the ticket is handed back the moment the bot is removed.