08 The mods
Ungodly Ravenfield AI
A ground-up overhaul of how Ravenfield's bots think, move, shoot, drive and fly — built by reading the game's decompiled AI source rather than guessing at it. Every change refines a system Ravenfield already has instead of replacing one, and a single switch reverts all of it instantly.
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The headline fix: the AI thinking cap#
This is the single highest-impact change in the mod, and it explains a symptom every Ravenfield player has seen.
Ravenfield budgets AI decision updates per frame inside ActorManager.UpdateAI(). The
intent is to spread each bot's thinking across a 0.2 second window, and that part works. The
problem is a hard ceiling of fifty updates per frame. Once more than roughly sixty bots are alive,
that ceiling bites every single frame and the round-robin cursor can no longer get all the way
around the actor list inside its window.
Bots then think at a fraction of their intended rate, and the shortfall gets worse the bigger the battle gets.
The mod replaces that budget with an adaptive one that protects a target framerate by scaling the cap up and down, with a floor at Ravenfield's own stock limit so it can never end up worse than vanilla.
Crashes that permanently disable a bot#
Ravenfield's AI routines run inside coroutine iterators. If one of them throws, that iterator stops — and the bot it belongs to never thinks again for the rest of the match. It stands there, alive and shootable, for the next twenty minutes. A full read of the decompiled source turned up several places this happens:
| The fault | What it did |
|---|---|
| Seventy-seven unguarded squad dereferences | Any bot without a squad hit a null reference the moment one of these ran. Fixed at the source by putting squadless bots back into a nearby squad rather than patching seventy-seven call sites. |
FindNextNoneLinkNode() on an empty route |
Indexes element minus one, throws, and permanently lobotomises the bot. |
SpamFire() and SquadFacingBias() |
Two more unguarded null dereferences, sitting inside the AiWeapon and
AiScan iterators respectively — so both take out the whole routine. |
| Permanently broken routing | A pathing state a bot could enter and never leave. |
| Flipped vehicles and beached boats | Neither had detection, so a rolled jeep or a grounded landing craft simply stayed there with its crew inside for the rest of the round. |
Four presets, on the General tab#
Each is a complete opinionated configuration rather than a difficulty slider, and none of them touches your hotkey, your performance settings or the bug fixes — so switching between them is free.
Vanilla+
Ravenfield as it should have shipped. Every bug fix on, everything that changes the feel of the AI back to roughly stock. Start here if you want the repairs without the redesign.
Tactical
The default experience leaned further into deliberate infantry combat. Squads bound, hold fire, spread out and manoeuvre. Slower, more positional, much harder to brute force.
Brutal
Straighter shooting, faster spotting, harder pushes, tight coordination, heavily weighted toward Veteran and Elite. Genuinely punishing.
Cinematic
Tuned for spectacle rather than difficulty. Loose aim, plenty of grenades and smoke, aggressive pushes, wide formations, frequent flanking. Big loud battles that are fun to watch and forgiving to fight.
What is on each tab#
| Tab | Covers |
|---|---|
| General | Master switch, the four presets, hotkey, panel scale, personality reroll, diagnostics readout |
| Behaviour | Reaction time, spot speed, sight through fog, peripheral vision, squad alert relay speed, suppression response, cover-seeking, crouch and prone decisions, falling back when badly hurt, investigating nearby gunfire, sprint urgency |
| Pathing | Corner smoothing (removes the robotic zig-zagging), bots walking around each other instead of forming a shoving queue in doorways, doorway easing so a squad files through a gap single-file, and the anti-stuck system |
| Combat | Aim wobble, turn-onto-target speed, moving-target leading, target settling, recoil control, trigger discipline, stopping to take an aimed shot, leaning around corners, close-quarters strafing, melee charging, accuracy-aware positioning |
| Weapons | Effectiveness re-grading, range-aware switching (no more bots trying to snipe you from three metres), reloading from behind cover, swapping instead of reloading up close, manning static emplacements |
| Explosives | Throw frequency, min and max throw range, per-bot cooldown, friendly blast safety, preferring to grenade targets that are camping or behind unshootable cover, rocket priority against vehicles, smarter smoke use |
| Vehicles | Driving skill, steering stability (kills the fishtailing weave), look-ahead distance, cornering caution, avoiding friendly vehicles and friendly infantry, plus inversion and beaching detection |
| Aircraft | Pilot skill, cruise altitudes, attack ranges, dogfight aggression, terrain avoidance that pulls up before flying into a hillside, and mid-air separation so a friendly air wing does not wipe itself out over the runway |
| Personality | Per-bot fighting styles, their relative weights and a spread slider — see below |
| Squad / Suppression | Sector security, bounding overwatch, formation spread, the suppression model, sustained return fire, stealth-aware detection, threat-based target retention, skill-scaled target prediction |
| Perf / Fixes | The adaptive AI budget, the individual bug fixes as separate toggles, and the diagnostic counters |
Personalities#
Every bot gets a persistent fighting style: Aggressive, Cautious, Marksman, Flanker, Support or Balanced, with adjustable relative weights and a spread slider. Optionally they request matching weapons through Ravenfield's own loadout system, so a bot's personality is visible at a glance from what it is carrying.
The skill tier Ravenfield never spawns#
Ravenfield fully implements four skill tiers but only ever assigns three — the only code that sets skill has no Elite branch, so Elite bots exist in the game's design and never in a match. On top of that, vanilla assigns skill by taking a modulo over a seeded index, which distributes it in a fixed repeating pattern rather than randomly.
This mod unlocks the Elite tier and replaces that assignment with a proper weighted draw across all four tiers. Skill also now decides how careful a soldier is and where he chooses to stand, not just how straight he shoots.
How it stays compatible#
This is a design rule rather than a hope, and it is worth understanding if you run other AI mods.
- Almost every hook is a Harmony postfix that adjusts a value the game already computed. Vanilla logic always runs first and is never skipped or short-circuited.
- Exactly three vanilla methods are replaced outright — the AI tick budget, the AI routine ticker, and the vehicle anti-stuck budget. Each is a faithful reimplementation that falls straight back to the stock version if anything goes wrong, and all three are documented in the source.
- All 51 patch points are applied individually inside their own try/catch. If a future Ravenfield update renames a method, that single feature turns itself off with a warning in the log and everything else keeps working.
- Conflicts are reported, not resolved. After patching, the mod asks Harmony who else has hooked the same methods and reports what it finds in the log and the panel footer. Nothing is unpatched on the basis of it — which of two mods should win is your call.
- Compatible with Enhanced
- Completely. Separate GUIDs, separate config files, no shared state, no overlapping patch targets. F5 and F6 do not collide.
- Compatible with Gore
- Completely. Zero patch-target overlap, verified explicitly.
- Mutators and custom maps
- Safe. Each patch point fails independently.
- Multiplayer
- Singleplayer and skirmish focused, as Ravenfield itself is.
The scale of it#
Beyond the headline items, the mod adds a long list of behaviours that Ravenfield's AI has no concept of. A sample rather than a catalogue:
Squads that act like squads
Bounding overwatch, sector security, fire-team roles with a point man who changes, rear security that actually watches the way the squad came, and formations that follow the job — column travelling, vee alert, wedge advancing, line holding.
Suppression that means something
Incoming fire builds real pressure that degrades aim and drives bots to cover, so covering fire finally does something mechanical rather than decorative.
Morale that develops
Casualties and kills shift a squad's willingness to push, take cover, retreat and flank, so engagements have a turning point instead of being fought at one temperature start to finish.
Memory of the ground
Teams learn which positions keep killing them and stop retreating into them. Cover remembers who died there. Positions get stronger the longer they are held.
Casualty awareness
Nothing in vanilla ever observes a friendly dying. Deaths are now hooked, so killing someone alerts nearby friendlies, turns them toward the shot and rattles them — and gives your position away.
Grenade dodging
Bots dive away from grenades, which vanilla has no reaction to at all. Squads regroup when mauled, and infantry recognise when armour is a problem they cannot solve.