The minds of the Worldwound: how enemy AI is wired

Counted from logic/units.jsonl (brain references per unit) and staging/by-folder/Brain.jsonl (the shared AI vocabulary) — build 20212986, patch 2.7.0x.

Five thousand demons, cultists, and wolves — and almost none of them are thinking for themselves. Enemy AI is a sharing economy.

One brain, eighteen hundred owners

Across 5,784 non-test units there are just 889 distinct brain assignments, and the distribution is brutally top-heavy:

• A single brain is assigned to 1,843 units — about a third of the entire roster. It is the generic melee-mob mind.
• The next most-shared brain covers 480 more.
• At the other end, 446 brains are used by exactly one unit each — the bespoke minds of unique bosses.

Eighty-six units ship with no brain at all: props, corpses-in-waiting, and scripted-only actors.

The vocabulary is small

The shared AI library (Brain/) contains only 25 hand-written brains, plus their reusable parts: 185 cast-spell actions (BlueprintAiCastSpell — "if you know this spell and conditions say so, cast it"), 154 buff considerations ("is this state already on someone?"), and 45 area checks. Brains are assembled from these verbs, then assigned by reference — which is why a demon horde can feel varied while running three minds between them.

What this means for players

• Mob variety is stat variety, not behavior variety: two mobs that look different usually run the same decision list.
• Unique bosses genuinely are special — one in three-ish has a brain written for them alone.
• "Why did that caster never use its best spell?" — the answer lives in these consideration conditions, not in randomness. The AI is a checklist runner, and every check is in the data.

Sources

• logic/units.jsonl#brain — per-unit brain assignment.
• staging/by-folder/Brain.jsonl — the 498-row AI vocabulary dump (brains, considerations, cast-spell actions).
• Build: 20212986 (patch 2.7.0x).