Playerbot survival: healing, retreat, and recovery

[adrunkhuman]

Survival and healing

Build a reusable playerbot healing and survival subsystem. It must observe health independently of the current objective, choose legal recovery, verify the effect, and coordinate with combat, navigation, service, and future safe-region planning.

Healing is a global maintenance interrupt. Hunting is only one source of damage; PvP, raids, environmental damage, scripted encounters, and world events use the same mechanism.

First milestone

• Observe current and maximum health on every normal decision cycle.
• At a configured health percentage, interrupt the current action and use a carried small health potion on self through normal item-use APIs.
• Respect action and potion cooldowns. Issue no more than one healing action at a time.
• Verify from observed item-count and health changes. Distinguish successful use, unverified use, missing supplies, and ineffective recovery.
• Do not acquire a combat target while critically low.
• If no supported healing action is available, cancel attack/follow and emit an explicit bounded survival outcome. Do not continue combat blindly.
• Resume the interrupted objective when the immediate healing condition clears.
• Emit stable telemetry with trigger reason, health before/after, selected method, resource before/after, result, and failure reason.

This milestone excludes safe-place discovery, kiting, spell healing, predictive damage modeling, and automatic selection across every potion item.

Recovery methods

• Discover or expose healing effects from authoritative loaded item, action, rune, and spell data. Do not maintain a permanent hardcoded playerbot list.
• Support health potions, healing runes/items, and vocation/level-appropriate healing spells.
• Represent level, vocation, magic level, mana, soul, charges, inventory, range, target, exhaustion group, cooldown, and applicable-condition requirements.
• Compare legal methods by expected recovery, overheal, action delay, resource cost, scarcity, and current danger.
• Reserve supplies for the current objective and trigger service/refill before required resources run out where practical.
• Treat regeneration and other passive effects as observed state, not immediate active healing actions.

Survival policy

• Separate health assessment, method selection, action execution, and retreat planning.
• Let urgent healing preempt hunting, looting, service, travel, quests, and idle behavior without duplicating healing logic in each subsystem.
• Define health bands and hysteresis to prevent oscillation between normal and emergency behavior.
• Use incoming damage rate, nearby attackers, conditions, cooldown readiness, available healing throughput, and route risk to choose continuation, disengagement, or retreat.
• Resume an interrupted objective only when it is still valid.
• Death is a playerbot-manager lifecycle outcome. Healing telemetry must retain enough context to explain a failed survival decision.

Retreat

Retreat is a global survival mode that any objective can enter. Trigger it when low health and available healing cannot cover expected damage; weigh health, recent damage, attackers, conditions, healing stock, and cooldowns. A level-1 soak lost Bot One to rats after healing ran out while it kept fighting — the concrete failure this behavior prevents.

While retreating:

• Stop hunting, chasing, and looting; move toward the safe destination.
• Fight only creatures that block the escape route (Build reusable playerbot combat targeting and tactics #54 owns blocker target selection).
• Replan when the route or destination becomes unsafe. A no-spawn tile is not necessarily safe; check live creatures and route danger too.
• Go to service if recovery remains impossible; resume the old objective only when it is still valid and health is safe.

Choose the destination dynamically while the bot moves: for PvE, a reachable area with fewer or weaker spawns or no spawn pressure; for PvP, a reachable protection zone (if PZ lock blocks entry, survive until entry is legal); otherwise a suitable temple, service point, PZ, or low-risk area.

Scale: do not run whole-map pathfinding per bot per tick. Share static topology, PZ, spawn, transition, and service data; keep a few candidate anchors per bot, re-score on bounded intervals or state changes, and route only when retreat starts or the route becomes invalid.

Add deterministic PvE and non-hunt retreat cases covering destination selection, blocker combat, replanning, arrival or bounded failure, and clear telemetry. #51 and #28 own region and route data.

Hunting and safe regions

• Integrate with future map/spawn-derived hunting regions without manually authored safe coordinates.
• Let region analysis expose escape transitions, nearby lower-danger connected regions, service distance, spawn pressure, and recovery suitability.
• During a hunt, use this data to choose healing in place, kiting, leaving the immediate spawn area, returning to service, or abandoning the hunt.
• Do not require safe-region knowledge to react to PvP, raids, scripted encounters, or damage during travel outside a hunt.
• Revalidate dynamic danger and reachability while retreating. A nominally safe destination can become blocked or hostile.

Constraints

• Use normal player item-use, spell, movement, cooldown, mana, inventory, and condition APIs.
• Do not directly mutate health, mana, conditions, inventory, or position.
• Do not parse Lua/XML source text in playerbot code.
• Keep decisions bounded on the dispatcher/scheduler model for eventual multi-bot scale.
• Treat missing supplies, cooldowns, and unsupported methods as expected policy outcomes, not generic action failures.

Completion checks

• A damaged bot below the initial threshold uses a carried small health potion on itself and verifies resource and health effects.
• Healing interrupts combat and non-combat objectives, then resumes the still-valid objective.
• Cooldown and action timing prevent duplicate or spammed healing requests.
• Missing, unverified, and ineffective healing have distinct bounded outcomes.
• A critically low bot does not acquire a new target when no supported recovery action is ready.
• Deterministic coverage includes combat damage, non-combat damage, successful healing, cooldown, no supplies, rejected use, and objective resumption.
• Later spell support selects only legally castable spells and verifies mana, cooldown, and health effects.
• Later retreat support chooses a reachable lower-risk region from discovered world and hunting-region data, not a hardcoded escape coordinate.

Delivered in PR #45

PR #45 delivers the small-health-potion milestone:

• Health is observed globally on every normal playerbot decision cycle.
• At or below 60% health, carried small health potions interrupt the current objective and are used one at a time through normal use-with-creature handling.
• Potion-count and net-health deltas distinguish success, missing supply, unverified use, and ineffective recovery.
• Action timing prevents duplicate requests. A still-valid objective resumes after recovery.
• Missing stock redirects to the existing service loop. Newly purchased potions are not consumed until purchase verification and stage advancement finish.
• Deterministic supplied-stock and zero-stock scenarios verify healing, refill, transaction safety, and objective resumption.

Spell/rune capability discovery, mana policy, conditions, predictive survival assessment, and map-derived retreat remain open. #46 indexes broader health, mana, regeneration, and recovery coordination.

Related work

• Run a sustainable mainland hunt-to-depot loop #22: sustainable hunt/service/depot loop.
• Build map-derived playerbot navigation and transitions #28: map-derived navigation for retreat execution.
• Playerbot NPC services: discovery, dialogue, and transactions #33: service discovery and supply refill.
• Playerbot looting: corpse handling and inventory planning #35: loot, inventory policy, and supply reserves.
• Scale PlayerBotManager beyond Bot One #18: multi-bot lifecycle and scheduling scale.

[adrunkhuman]

Merged #186 (af562324dade073590fc6edd349cbac83f9df108). Supply poverty now degrades to bounded income recovery rather than an unchanged Service loop. Transit permits one five-second route-blocker defense and, after fixed-goal exhaustion, a final 30-second no-chase breakout with healing priority and route reevaluation. This is blocked-transit recovery, not general map-derived safe-place retreat, kiting, or completion of this issue.