Searching¶

Overview¶

Searching is the third rung of the perception ladder: once a profiled agent has lost contact and finds nobody informed nearby to follow, it walks to the spot where it last had the target instead of standing still or carrying on toward wherever the target actually went. In motion, a chaser that loses sight around a corner commits to checking that corner rather than snapping back to idle. Once it arrives it stops a short way from the spot and waits, then wanders off when its memory has faded. Turn it on for any archetype that should look like it is genuinely hunting rather than only reacting to what is directly in view.

Lives on the Perception Profile, and only steers inside Approach & Press

This is a section of the archetype's Perception Profile asset, the same asset Sight and Awareness live on, not a field on the Behavior Profile. The bookkeeping runs the moment a profile is assigned, but the steering it produces only happens inside the Approach & Press pass, so an archetype with Approach & Press disabled gets none of it, even with a Perception Profile assigned.

It sits below Following The Crowd in the same ladder. A neighbour who can see the target right now is better information than this agent's own memory, so Searching only runs for an agent that finds nobody informed nearby.

The Simple and Advanced grouping below is this page's own, not the inspector's. The Perception Profile has no mode switch and draws every field at once.

Parameter Reference¶

Simple Parameters¶

Start here: these decide whether this rung does anything at all

Enabled¶

This is the checkbox on the Searching section header.

Visible effect: A profiled agent that loses its target and finds nobody informed nearby stops standing in place and instead walks toward the spot where it last had contact. The same switch sends an agent that has no target at all to a noise it hears, such as a thrown bottle or an alarm from a Swarm Noise Emitter.
Gameplay effect: The difference between an enemy that gives up the instant it loses sight and one that visibly commits to checking the last place it saw you, which is what makes losing a chaser around a corner feel earned rather than arbitrary.
Increase when: Not applicable, it is a toggle.
Decrease when: Not applicable, it is a toggle.
Pitfalls: Off is the shipped default, and it is only tried after Following The Crowd. An agent with an informed neighbour nearby follows that instead of walking toward the remembered spot, whatever this is set to. With Searching off, a noise with no target behind it reaches the agent and moves nobody.
Technical effect: Gates whether a lost-contact agent's steering goal switches from the live target to a walkable destination near the remembered spot. Off, an agent that loses contact and finds no informed neighbour gets no steering at all from this ladder and mills until Idle Motion and Forget Time take over. It also gates the Noise goal: an agent with nothing it sees or remembers walks to where a targetless noise went off and forgets it after the Forget Time, fading at the same rate as a memory. A noise never overrides a remembered target. It waits underneath and is taken when that memory expires. A walk to a noise skips Following The Crowd.

Arrival Radius¶

Visible effect: How close a searching agent has to get to the remembered spot before it counts as arrived and settles into place, rather than pressing all the way onto the exact point.
Gameplay effect: Controls whether a crowd converging on a last-known position stacks onto one tile or spreads into a loose ring around it, the same way a standoff ring keeps a crowd off a live target.
Increase when: A crowd of searchers piles onto a single point instead of spreading out around the last known spot.
Decrease when: A small handful of searchers should converge tightly rather than settle in a wide ring.
Pitfalls: Only applies once an agent has a clear walk to the remembered spot itself. An agent detouring through a doorway on the way there is not standing at a ring yet, so widening this changes nothing about how a crowd behaves at the doorway.
Technical effect: Used as the arrival standoff radius when the agent's committed search destination is the remembered spot itself, the same way a standoff ring is used for a live target. It is not applied to an intermediate opening the search routes through first.

Advanced Parameters¶

Power-user knob: leave at defaults unless you have a reason

Opening Search Radius¶

Visible effect: How far a searching agent looks around itself for a doorway or opening once the direct line to the remembered spot is blocked. Wide enough and a walled-off agent finds its way through; set to 0 and that same agent just stops and mills at the wall it walked up to instead.
Gameplay effect: This is what actually makes a search work indoors. Without a wide enough radius, an agent standing in a hallway with the target's last position behind a wall gives up right there instead of walking to the door.
Increase when: Your rooms are large. Measure the distance from the far corner of your biggest room to its doorway and use at least that.
Decrease when: You want the cheaper distance-only search, or you deliberately want an agent blocked by a wall to give up on the spot rather than route around it.
Pitfalls: 0 does not mean "search everywhere," it means "never detour." An agent whose view of the remembered spot is blocked stops walking at the wall in front of it and mills until it forgets, rather than leaning on it. A very large value does not keep paying off: the search covers at most 24 cells in each direction, which is 12 units at the 0.5 unit cells the sample scenes use. The detour also needs a baked Surface Flow map. Without one the agent walks straight at the spot.
Technical effect: Runs a bounded search over the baked surface flow cell connectivity rather than a line-of-sight scan, so it only ever proposes a destination a walk can actually reach. It picks the reachable cell closest to the remembered spot, then takes the furthest point along that path the agent can reach in a straight line. A detour that brings the agent only slightly closer to the spot than it is now is not taken.

Practical Usage Guidance¶

Turn this on for any indoor or wall-heavy level where an enemy losing sight of the player around a corner should read as a real, commitment-driven search rather than an instant reset to idle. It pairs naturally with Following The Crowd: that rung catches agents with an informed neighbour nearby, and Searching picks up whoever is left.

Skip it for an archetype with no Approach & Press on its Behavior Profile, since the steering never runs, and skip it for open arenas with no walls worth routing around, where the direct-line case is the only one that ever triggers and Opening Search Radius never does anything.

A search that ends at a shut door the agents can break commits to the door itself. When the remembered spot lies inside such a door (the noise of a door being hit is made at its centre), the agent walks up and presses it, and gets no Arrival Radius ring there, because a ring would push the front rank off the door they are meant to break.

When the way round needs an opening, the search looks for one that does not go through a closed door first. Only if that finds nothing does it allow a door the agents can break. A door they cannot break is never searched through. See Doors and Barricades.

Searching borrows Forget Time as its whole budget

Searching has no clock of its own. An agent walks toward the last seen spot for exactly as long as Awareness's Forget Time allows, then drops the target when that fades to zero. Tune the length of a search on the Awareness page, not here.

Gameplay Interpretation¶

A generous Opening Search Radius reads as an enemy that genuinely hunts through a building, checking doorways and rooms rather than giving up at the first wall. A tight Arrival Radius reads as a crowd that converges tightly on the last known spot; a wide one reads as a loose sweep that spreads out around it instead of stacking up.

Quickstart: tune in this order

Tick the checkbox on the Searching header, and confirm the archetype's Behavior Profile has Approach & Press enabled.
Set Opening Search Radius to at least the corner-to-doorway distance of your biggest room, (a new profile starts at 8 units), or set it to 0 if walled-off agents should just give up.
Adjust Arrival Radius only if a converging crowd piles onto a single point instead of settling around it.