Garry's Mod Nextbots
Search for nextbots and you get two different things wearing one name. One is a part of the engine. The other is a genre of Workshop addon built on top of it: the bots with a photograph for a face that chase you down a corridor. Mixing them up is why so many people end up with a bot that spawns and then just stands there. Facepunch's NextBot page describes nextbots as NPCs that use the navmesh system for navigation instead of the older node based system, and that one sentence explains most of the trouble people have with them.
Last verified: September 17, 2026. Dedicated servers are still SteamCMD app 4020; the game itself is app 4000. Nextbot addons install like any other addon, but the navigation data they depend on is map data, not addon data, and it does not travel with a Workshop collection.
The engine feature and the meme
NextBot is not something an addon author invented and bolted on. It ships in the server binaries, which export the symbol CLuaNextBot, so the engine hands the system to Lua directly. A nextbot is written like any other scripted entity, in a file under lua/entities/ in an addon, with ENT.Base = "base_nextbot". Its behaviour lives in RunBehaviour(), which Facepunch describes as a loop that runs for as long as the entity exists, written as a coroutine so it can pause and wait between decisions. Movement goes through the bot's locomotion object, self.loco, with calls like SetDesiredSpeed(), FaceTowards() and IsStuck().
The meme category exists because that base is genuinely easy to reskin. Swap the model, swap the chase sound, upload. That is not a complaint about the genre, but it does mean a Workshop search returns mostly reskins, while the thing your server has to run is the engine feature underneath. The sprite is free. The pathfinding is not.
Navigation decides whether they work at all
Older Source NPCs walked a network of nodes compiled into the map. Nextbots do not. They move across a navigation mesh: a set of connected walkable areas, exposed to Lua as CNavArea objects and stored in a .nav file named after the map. Pathfinding helpers such as PathFollower plan a route through that graph, and the locomotion object then tries to walk it.
The consequence is blunt. A nextbot can only go where the mesh says it can go. On a map with no mesh there are no areas, so there is no path to compute, and the bot stands where it spawned with its animation playing. Nothing is broken, the addon is not corrupt, and reinstalling it changes nothing.
The shipped server install contains only two maps, gm_construct and gm_flatgrass. Everything else is community content, and community maps vary enormously in whether the author bothered to include a mesh. gm_construct does not come with one, which is why almost every nextbot tutorial opens by generating one. From the server console, with cheats enabled, nav_edit 1 followed by nav_generate builds a mesh, and nav_save writes it out. Generation is expensive: Facepunch warns that the Lua equivalent, navmesh.BeginGeneration, is highly resource intensive and unwise during normal gameplay. Generate once somewhere private, keep the resulting .nav file with the map, and ship that file. Do not regenerate on a live server with players connected.
Generated meshes are approximations of the geometry. Expect a generated mesh to be slightly wrong in places, and expect that to show up as odd movement rather than as an error message.
Getting nextbots onto a server
There is nothing special about installing them. Nextbots arrive as ordinary addons and follow the ordinary path, which is covered in the Workshop collections guide: the server references a collection, and joining clients download what is in it. Two details are worth holding on to.
- Garry's Mod loads every directory under
garrysmod/addons/. A nextbot dropped in by hand as a folder is live whether or not you remember putting it there, and Steam has no idea it exists. - Server-side installation is not client delivery. If the server has the addon and a joining player does not, that player sees a red ERROR sign where the bot should be, because the model is missing, or a purple and black checkerboard, because a material is missing. Those two symptoms have different causes and different fixes, laid out in missing textures and ERROR models and content packs and client delivery.
- The
.navfile is not part of the addon. Adding a nextbot to your collection does not give your maps navigation data. That is a separate job, done per map.
What nextbots actually cost a server
This is the part that surprises people. The client renders a sprite. The server does all of the thinking: every active nextbot runs its behaviour and its pathfinding inside the same tick that has to handle physics, Lua hooks and every connected player, and there is no spare core sitting idle to take the work.
So the failure mode does not look like a graphics problem. Players keep a perfectly smooth frame rate while the world stops answering: props hang in the air, shots do not register, everyone rubber-bands, and the bot jumps forward in teleporting steps. That is a server missing its tick budget, and it is the clearest sign you are running more nextbots than the machine can path for.
Practical limits that hold up in production:
- Use the gamemode's own cap, and set it below the machine's limit rather than at it. Headroom is what absorbs a busy round.
- Restrict nextbot spawning on public servers. A spawn menu that lets any player place bots is a self-service denial of service. See admin commands and moderation for the access side.
- Load test with the number you fear, not the number you expect. Spawn the worst case on an empty server and watch the server frame rate in the console
statsoutput before players find it for you. - Prefer well maintained addons. A bot that recalculates its path every tick costs several times what a bot that repaths on a timer costs, and the Workshop page will not tell you which you have. Subscriber history and an active comment thread are the best proxy you get.
- Account for map size. A large open map has a much larger mesh, so each bot costs more to path there than on a small arena. The same bot count is not the same load on two maps.
The September 2026 update brought 64-bit binaries on Windows, which meaningfully reduces the out-of-memory crashes that used to hit servers with a lot of addons loaded. That raises a memory ceiling. It does not make pathfinding cheaper, so it does not change any of the advice above.
Common nextbot problems
| Symptom | Cause | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Bot spawns and never moves | The map has no navigation mesh, or the bot was spawned somewhere outside any walkable area | Generate and save a mesh for the map, then spawn the bot on ordinary ground rather than on a prop or a roof. |
| Bot walks through walls, floats, or cuts corners | The mesh does not match the geometry. A generated area spans a gap or overlaps a prop, so the route is legal on the mesh even though it is not legal in the world | Regenerate the mesh, or use a map that ships a hand-corrected one. This is a map data problem, not an addon problem. |
| Bot is a red ERROR sign for players | The client never received the model. The server has the addon; the joining player does not | Confirm the addon is in the collection the server points clients at, then work through Workshop download troubleshooting. |
| Tick rate collapses when several spawn | Server-side pathfinding scaling with bot count, inside one tick budget | Cap concurrent bots, restrict who can spawn them, and retest on the map you actually run. |
| Bot ignores players entirely | Its behaviour loop never acquires a target: a decorative or roaming bot, or one written for a gamemode you are not running | Read the addon description for the gamemode it targets. Chase behaviour is written by the author, it is not automatic. |
The name is being used as bait
This matters more for nextbots than for almost any other search, because the category is huge, fast moving, and full of titles that are already meaningless. A fake upload does not look out of place among them.
The pattern reported through September 2026 is consistent: brand new low-level accounts, every addon uploaded on the same day, deliberately misspelled names such as "Nextboat" in place of Nextbot, and trend-bait titles built from whatever is popular that month. The misspelling is not carelessness. It dodges searches and reports while still catching people who are browsing rather than searching. Two or three of those signs together is enough to skip the item.
The stakes are higher for a server owner, because your collection is effectively your players' subscription list: everything in it lands on everyone who joins, and they will blame your server rather than the uploader. The full checklist, including what a so-called Garry's Mod virus really is and why reinstalling does not remove one, is in Workshop addon safety. Read it before adding bots from an unfamiliar author.
Sizing a server for a nextbot gamemode
Nextbot gamemodes push CPU rather than RAM, and they push single-thread CPU in particular, because the pathfinding runs on the main server thread. Treat these as starting points and measure your own map and bot count.
| Setup | Players | Starting point |
|---|---|---|
| Small friends server, a handful of bots | 4 to 16 | 2 GB RAM, a fast modern CPU, 15 GB SSD |
| Nextbot chase or hunt gamemode, curated collection | 16 to 32 | 4 GB RAM, high clock speed over core count, 25 GB SSD |
| Public server, large maps, high bot counts | 32 or more | 8 GB RAM or more, the best single-thread performance you can get, 50 GB NVMe |
If you are choosing between more cores and higher clock speed for a nextbot server, take the clock speed. More detail on both sides of that decision is in server requirements and server cost and sizing.
Related Garry's Mod guides
- Workshop addon safety, the bait uploads that use nextbot names
- Workshop collections and addons
- Missing textures and ERROR models
- Content packs and client delivery
- Workshop download troubleshooting
- Dedicated-server setup
- Startup flags and server.cfg
- Lua scripting on a server
- The September 2026 update for server owners
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