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Resource Gathering Minions: Gathering AI for Unreal Engine
Autonomous minions that find, harvest, and haul resources.
Resource Gathering Minions turns your AI characters into autonomous workers that find, harvest, and haul resources around your world. Give a minion an order and it locates the nearest matching resource, walks to it, extracts it over time, carries the result home, drops it on a tidy pile, and goes back for more. The whole system is server-authoritative and replication-ready, so the same setup runs in single player and in multiplayer.
From $24.99 on FAB
What it does
- Tag-driven orders matched by Gameplay Tags, so "gather wood" only ever harvests wood.
- Autonomous search for the closest reachable resource within a configurable radius.
- Timed extraction with finite yield: each resource is used up after a set number of extractions.
- Carry and haul: a carryable actor spawns into the minion hand and travels home.
- Auto-stacking drop-off arranges dropped resources into a neat pile.
- Behavior Tree driven and multiplayer-ready from the ground up.
See it in action
Screenshots
Frequently asked questions
- What do the minions do?
- Given an order, a minion finds the nearest matching resource, walks to it, extracts it over time, carries the result home, drops it on a tidy pile, and goes back for more, all autonomously.
- Does it work in multiplayer?
- Yes. The whole system is server-authoritative and replication-ready, so the same setup runs in single player and in multiplayer.
- How do I tell a minion what to gather?
- Orders are tag-driven, matched by Gameplay Tags, so a "gather wood" order only ever harvests wood. The behavior runs on an included Behavior Tree.
- What kind of games is it for?
- RTS and survival games, or any project that needs autonomous worker AI that finds, harvests, and hauls resources.
Tutorials & guides
- The Drop-Off Pile: Home Location and Pyramid Stacking How gathered resources pile up neatly in Unreal Engine: a home location set on assignment or moved by cursor, an optional home marker actor, and a stacking utility that places each dropped item into a centered three-row pyramid instead of a messy heap.
- Multiplayer Gatherer AI: The Ownership and Replication Spine Why resource-gathering AI in Unreal Engine must be spawned and owned by the player: beginning an assignment is a Server RPC, so the client has to own the minion. The full ownership chain from player to minion to resource to carried actor, plus the replicated state that keeps clients in sync.
- The Carried Resource: Spawn at a Socket, Attach, and Drop How the harvested item is spawned, attached to a skeletal mesh socket, and dropped in Unreal Engine: an Extracted Resource component that rides the carried actor, server-side spawn and ownership, and a collision swap so the haul never shoves the worker but still stacks on the pile.
- The Resource Component: Harvestable Actors and the NavMesh Gotcha How a Resource component marks an actor as harvestable in Unreal Engine: a Sphere component that doubles as the overlap trigger and extraction timer, a replicated extraction count that destroys the actor when depleted, and the Can Ever Affect Navigation trap that stops a worker reaching it.
- Assignments and Gameplay Tags: One Gather Job Into Many How a data asset of Gameplay Tag pairs turns a single resource-gathering loop into wood, stone, and anything else in Unreal Engine. Each assignment maps an order tag to a resource tag, a carried actor, a Behavior Tree, a home marker, and an attach socket.
- The Gatherer Component: Driving an Unreal Behavior Tree Loop How the Gatherer component turns an AI character into an autonomous worker in Unreal Engine: a Server RPC to begin an assignment, a replicated state enum for animation, and a Blueprint-callable API that Behavior Tree tasks call to find, extract, carry, and drop.
- Resource Gathering AI in Unreal: How the Gather Loop Is Structured The architecture behind autonomous gatherer AI in Unreal Engine: three actor components (Gatherer, Resource, Extracted Resource), one Assignment data asset, and a Behavior Tree that sequences the find, extract, carry, drop loop, all server-authoritative.
- Resource Gathering AI in Unreal Engine: Complete Guide How to build autonomous worker AI in Unreal Engine that finds, harvests, and hauls resources: three components, an assignment data asset, a Behavior Tree gather loop, and a server-authoritative ownership spine. A seven-part guide, from architecture to the drop-off pile.