Difficulty

Difficulty is one knob instead of thirty. A bot does not feel human because a die decided it would strafe this tick; it feels human because it sees the fight late, aims imperfectly, respects its own attack cooldown, and executes techniques it has actually decided to execute. Every one of those numbers is derived from a single rung.

bot:
  mode: POT_PVP
  difficulty: NORMAL

The mode decides which techniques exist. Difficulty decides how well they are executed — and it applies to every mode identically, so HARD means the same standard of play whether the bot is holding a sword or a crystal.

The five rungs

EASY — reacts late, misses

It is deciding on a world half a second old, its head turns at nine degrees a tick, and its hit cone is as narrow as the ladder gets — so a bot that arrived late genuinely swings through empty air. It swings at half a charge, throws away about one swing in six on purpose, gives up a combo after a quarter of a second, and panics: with patience at 0.20 it will start a golden apple in the middle of your combo, which is exactly the mistake that loses a round. Strafe hard and it will not be looking at you.

NORMAL — a decent server regular

Reaction is down to six ticks and the head turns twice as fast, which is enough for the cone to start doing its work rather than the reaction. It lands most techniques — a little over half — waits for two thirds of a charge, and holds a combo for nearly half a second. It still throws away about one swing in fourteen, and it still eats at the wrong moment about half the time. This is the rung where a fight is decided by your play rather than by its errors.

HARD — practises daily

Three ticks of reaction, a head that turns 44 degrees a tick, and technique at 0.85: the guard breaks, the webs and the double taps mostly land. It waits for four fifths of a charge, sits at 94 % of its reach — far enough out that it can hit you and be stepped away from — and holds a combo for two thirds of a second. Mistakes are down to one in fifty. It punishes every heal, and it will not be caught eating.

INSANE — frame perfect

Two ticks of reaction, a hand that barely wobbles, and technique at its ceiling: every optional technique this bot knows, it lands. It swings at 99 % charge, which means it never wastes a hit, and its crystal is armed and popped inside a handful of ticks. A wasted swing happens once in 250. Bring a shield or a totem.

EXTREME — a wall, not a fair fight

Technique is already maxed at INSANE — mastery has a ceiling and that rung is at it. What EXTREME buys past there is everything with no ceiling: it sees the world one tick old, its crosshair barely moves, it never blunders at all, it re-decides its tactic every two ticks, and its crystal is armed and gone in the time it takes to blink. It is meant to be unfair. It is a wall to measure yourself against.

The ladder, in numbers

What each of those controls

Reaction, ticks. How stale the world the AI decides on is — one tick is 50 ms, so EASY fights half a second in the past and EXTREME one twentieth of one. Everything in the humanising layer hangs off this number, which is why it is the one that changes how a rung feels rather than how it performs on paper.

Aim noise, degrees. The drive of the crosshair's tremor. Deliberately small: a real hand shakes by a fraction of a degree, and a bot whose crosshair swings whole degrees does not read as a weak player, it reads as a broken one. What makes a weak player weak is reacting late and turning slowly.

Turn rate, degrees per tick. How fast the head can turn. Paired with reaction time this is the whole reason strafing works against a low rung and does not work against a high one — and it is briefly boosted when the bot needs to look at something urgently, like a crystal it has decided to set off.

Cooldown discipline. The minimum attack charge it will swing at, 0 to 1. At EASY's 0.50 half of every hit's damage is thrown away on a bar that was not full; at INSANE and above nothing is.

Technique. Mastery of the optional techniques, 0 to 1, and it multiplies every one of them. A guard break rolled at 0.9 lands 90 % of the time at INSANE and 18 % of the time at EASY — the same technique, in worse hands.

Mistake chance. The chance per swing of missing on purpose. Not a rounding error: at EASY it is one swing in six that simply does not connect, on top of everything the aim model already gets wrong.

Decision, ticks. How often the tactical layer re-decides — whether to press, to space, to heal, to burst. A rung that re-decides every 14 ticks commits to a bad plan for most of a second; one that re-decides every two changes its mind before you have finished the movement that would have punished it.

Patience. Willingness to wait for a safe moment instead of panicking. It gates two things: backing off after being comboed or while losing a trade, and — in pot PvP and UHC — refusing to start a thirty-two-tick golden apple in the middle of your combo.

Spacing. The fraction of its reach it likes to sit at, multiplied by the mode's own reach factor. It rises with skill on purpose: a good player fights at the end of their sword, where they can hit and be stepped away from. Sitting well inside reach is not a weak player's spacing, it is a free hit every cooldown.

Combo, ticks. How long it keeps chasing after a knockback hit. A quarter of a second at EASY and a full second at EXTREME — the difference between a bot you can walk away from and one that is still on you when you land.

Crystal arm, ticks. The delay between arming a crystal and popping it, and by extension the whole chain: it lays obsidian for about half that time first, plus however long the shield still needs to become real. EASY takes most of a second per crystal; EXTREME does it in three ticks. It also halves the time to get a fresh totem into the bot's hand after one pops — crystal PvP reacts in half the time, because that swap is the one thing a crystal player drills, but nothing skips the hands: a bot that re-arms inside a single tick is not a window anybody can punish, and a bot nobody can punish is not practice.

The hit cone: why a weak bot actually misses

A swing connects when the crosshair is inside a cone around the target — and the cone is not the same width for everybody.

It scales with reflex, not with mastery: the cone is what turns a head that arrived late into a swing that missed, and how late a head arrives is reaction time and turn rate. One cone for everybody was what made a weak bot hit like a strong one — at 35 degrees the crosshair can be most of a body-width off and the swing still lands, so late reactions, a slow head and a wobbling hand all cost nothing. An EASY bot has to be genuinely looking at you to hit you; an EXTREME one connects from wherever its crosshair ended up.

Inside one block horizontally the cone is not applied at all. Standing inside somebody is not an aim problem, and a cone measured from an eye a foot away would reject hits vanilla would land.

Three more things scale off the same reflex figure rather than off a table:

• The hand on the mouse. Aim is a second-order system, not a slew limit — it accelerates, and it does not stop the instant the crosshair arrives. At the bottom of the ladder it is well under critically damped, so an EASY bot swings its crosshair past you and has to come back for it. At the top the flick simply lands.
• Key hold time. The shortest time a movement key combination stays held: six ticks at EASY, down to two at the top. Without a floor there the bot re-solves its heading every tick and slides around on a perfectly smooth curve, which no amount of good technique elsewhere can make look human.
• Swing distance. The distance each individual swing is thrown from is re-rolled every time, from 80 % of reach upward at EASY and from 99 % at EXTREME. A bot that attacks at exactly its maximum reach every single time is reporting its own hitbox maths out loud.

Names and one-line summaries

What players read for each rung is messages.yml, not the enum:

placeholders:
  difficulty:
    easy: '{success_light}Easy'
    normal: '{info}Normal'
    hard: '{warning}Hard'
    insane: '{error}Insane'
    extreme: '{accent}&lExtreme'
    easy-summary: 'Reacts late, misses, swings before the bar is full.'
    normal-summary: 'A server regular. Still makes mistakes.'
    hard-summary: 'Tight spacing, clean combos, punishes every heal.'
    insane-summary: 'Frame perfect. Bring a shield or a totem.'
    extreme-summary: 'No reaction time, no mistakes, no mercy.'

Changing the rung from the menu confirms with the bot.difficulty-changed message, which carries %difficulty%. Unlike a mode change, it never touches the kit.