Massive Swarm System

Asset description

🚀 Built for Unity 2022.3 LTS, ready for Unity 6 and checked up to 6.6. Massive Swarm System drops a thousand-plus enemies into a plain Unity GameObject project and holds your frame rate while they swarm. It's the missing piece for games where the threat is the crowd itself. One Swarm Manager ticks the whole swarm in a single loop: no per-agent Update, no DOTS or ECS rewrite, no NavMeshAgent baking. Everything is in the box: simulation, navigation, spawning, behaviors, and the VAT animation baking tools, with nothing else to buy. The core runtime references nothing beyond the engine, so it compiles in a bare project. Agents chase, surround, hold their spacing, and pile on pressure as a crowd, all driven by data instead of a script on every enemy. They can also be made to notice you first: give them a Perception Profile and they stand idle until they see or hear something, then come looking, and a door in their way is one more thing the crowd pushes through. You stay in the GameObject workflow you already know. It's made for survivor-likes, bullet-heaven games, zombie hordes, and arena survival: any 3D game where the pressure comes from sheer numbers and how they move, not from per-unit orders or scripted set pieces. 🎮 Play the demo | 💬 Discord | 📕 Manual | ▶️ Video Tutorials 🐝 At a glance 1000+ agents at frame rate from a single centralized simulation tick Everything included: no paid add-ons, no GPU instancing or animation packages to buy Plain GameObject workflow: no DOTS, ECS, or extra packages for the core runtime Approach & Press, Personal Space, Orbit Style, and Retreat behaviors out of the box Agents that have to notice you: sight, hearing, a memory of where they last had you, and a call to the ones nearby Doors, barricades and pushed props the crowd wears down, with no navigation rebake Importance LOD keeps a pile-on around the player inside the frame budget Simulation and visuals decoupled: render with pooled MeshRenderers (SRP Batcher) or GPU-instanced VAT One-click setup and a scene-view overlay get your first swarm running in minutes Surface Flow Field navigation for levels with walls, stairs, and uneven floors Every setting is rated for performance impact, so you can see what costs frames before you change it Inspectors open in Simple mode and hide the settings most projects never touch ⚙️ Performance & scale Measured on named hardware in a release build: 3,848 agents at 63 FPS (15.8 ms) in the Pyramid demo scene, with every one of them on screen. Intel i7-10700K, NVIDIA RTX 3080, Unity 2022.3.62f2, 1440p on the High Fidelity tier with dynamic shadows and camera effects on. Download the same demo and read the same counter yourself. It holds up on a phone too. A release APK runs 1,124 agents at 40 FPS on an OPPO A74 5G, Performant tier, 1440p at 60% render scale, with shadows and camera effects on and the player alive in a dense crowd. Manager-driven simulation: the whole swarm updates in one tick, with no per-agent Update, FixedUpdate, or LateUpdate Dense internal agent data built for scalable movement and behavior Spatial grid for spacing, neighbor checks, and body blocking Importance LOD tiers that scale behavior and visual cost by how much each agent matters Inspector performance hints and a live stats overlay to measure and tune on-device Green, amber and red dots rate each setting for how its cost grows with the swarm, and the tooltip says why it earned that rating A High Impact filter collapses the inspector down to the settings that get expensive at 1000+ agents 👁️ Perception, doors & barricades (new in 1.1) A Perception Profile per archetype: agents idle until they see, hear, feel or are told about a target, chase what they noticed, walk to the spot where they last had it, and go back to idling when they lose it Swarm Noise Emitter for the gunshot, the alarm or the bottle down the alley. Agents nearby come looking, and walls can quieten it or stop it Shoot an agent and it turns on whoever fired Swarm Flow Modifier closes or adds cost to part of the baked flow field at runtime, with no rebake Swarm Breakable lets the swarm fight through a door or a barricade. Every agent queued against it adds its weight, not only the front rank Swarm Pushable for props the crowd and the player shove aside Scene view layers show what each agent knows, its sight cone, where a searching agent is walking and who just called out Leave the Perception Profile empty and the swarm behaves as it always did 🧠 Behaviors & navigation Seven behavior passes you mix per archetype: Approach & Press, Personal Space, Retreat, Group Pull, Predictive Catch-Up, Orbit Style, and Idle Motion ScriptableObject movement and behavior profiles you tune in the inspector Variety inside one enemy type: speed, turning and attack timing can each be a range or a curve, and one roll per agent links them, so the slow walker is also slow to turn and slow to swing Automatic target registration with multi-target support and retargeting hysteresis Surface Flow Field navigation for walls, stairs, and uneven floors Pressure Recycler moves agents that fall behind the player back into the arc ahead of them, so a fixed pool feels like an endless horde 🎛️ Spawning & setup Rect and ring shape spawners A Spawner Director to coordinate multiple spawners for ambushes and maintained hordes Agent archetypes bundling prefab, radius, push resistance, and the movement, behavior, attack and perception profiles Welcome window, scene-view create buttons, and an archetype wizard with five ready presets: Zombie Horde, Sword Mob, Skittering Bug, Ranged Skirmisher, and Custom (Defaults) Simple and Advanced modes on the Swarm Manager, the Swarm Settings, the Behavior Profile and the VAT Baker. Simple hides fields, it never turns them off A search box that reads field names, tooltips and the problem you are having. Type "jitter" or "falls through floor" and it lands on the field that fixes it Six one-click behavior presets: Direct Chaser, Loose Surround, Tight Horde, Melee Queue, Wide Circle and Vampire Survivors Crowd. Pick one and the crowd behaves before you tune anything 🎨 Visuals & rendering Pooled visual GameObjects that follow the simulation data Visual interpolation for smooth movement at any tick rate Optional Animator-based visual syncing, with an Attack Trigger for the swing Optional VAT animation workflow for high-count animated enemies, with VAT Baker tools included and an SRP Batcher compatible shader The VAT Baker prints the GPU cost of a bake before you run it, rated against the platform tier you picked, from Mobile-Friendly to Oversized The baker measures your clips: how fast the walk and run have to travel for the feet to hold the ground, and the moment the blow lands in the attack. Match speeds and hit timing then set themselves An optional Death clip: the agent falls, lies still, then fades A baked VAT prefab animates on its own, with no swarm and no code, so the same bake works for a prop character 🧰 Damage, source & integration Attack profiles with optional swing and contact damage, each with its own reach, timing and pushback strength A swing can be dodged: step out of reach during the windup and it misses Damage interfaces that hand your own health system the hit point, direction, normal and pushback strength, so the reactions stay yours Knockback runs both ways. One call sends agents flying, and you set how long before their own steering takes back over Full C# source, no DLLs One editor-only network call: at most once a day the editor asks the Unity Asset Store for the latest version number, so it can tell you about an update. It sends nothing about you or your project, never runs in a build, and one checkbox in Project Settings turns it off Core runtime is render-pipeline-agnostic and references nothing beyond the engine, with the optional Input System helpers in a separate assembly. The included visuals need URP, because the VAT shader is URP-only The samples ask for more, all of it free: StarterKit wants TextMeshPro, and the Full Demo (the Shared, Egypt and Templates folders) wants TextMeshPro, Cinemachine 3.x and the Input System. Delete a sample folder and its requirement goes with it Five demo scenes, among them MSS Zombie City: a street of sleeping zombies, a twin-stick survivor, doors and barricades AI Skills: four instruction files that teach a coding agent such as Claude Code or Cursor how to set up and tune a swarm with this asset Debug tools and gizmos, sample prefabs, and offline documentation 💬 Support: Discord | Support page | support@creativespore.com 🌐 Web: www.creativespore.com 🐦 Twitter: @CreativeSpore Key features: Manager-driven swarm simulation No per-agent Update, FixedUpdate, or LateUpdate simulation logic No DOTS, ECS, Jobs/Burst, or NavMeshAgent required GameObject-based workflow Full C# source, no DLLs Dense internal agent data for scalable movement and behavior Spatial grid for spacing, neighbor checks, and body blocking Obstacle blocking against your own collider layers Ground probing so agents follow uneven terrain and stairs ScriptableObject movement profiles ScriptableObject behavior profiles Agent archetypes for prefab, radius, push resistance, and the movement, behavior, attack and perception profiles Per-agent variation on movement and attack values (Fixed, Range, Curve or Band), with one shared roll per agent so a slow walker is also slow to turn Rect and ring spawners Spawner director for coordinating multiple spawners Automatic target registration Multi-target support with retargeting hysteresis Seven behavior passes: Approach & Press, Personal Space, Retreat, Group Pull, Predictive Catch-Up, Orbit Style, and Idle Motion Optional Perception Profiles: agents idle until they see, hear, feel or are told about a target, then chase, search and give up Swarm Noise Emitter, with walls that quieten or stop a noise Importance LOD tiers for behavior and visual cost control Pooled visual GameObjects Visual interpolation and extrapolation support Optional Animator-based visual syncing, with an attack trigger Optional VAT animation workflow for high-count animated enemies VAT Baker tools included, with an optional death clip and measured attack, walk and run timing Baked VAT prefabs also animate on their own, outside a swarm SRP Batcher compatible VAT shader Optional swing damage profiles Optional contact damage profiles Damage interfaces carrying hit point, direction, normal and pushback strength Agent knockback API with a tunable external-control window Surface Flow Field navigation support Swarm Flow Modifier closes or adds cost to part of the baked flow field at runtime, with no rebake Swarm Breakable and Swarm Pushable for doors, barricades and props the crowd breaks or shoves aside Debug tools and gizmos, including Scene view layers for perception Runtime stats overlay for on-device measurement Inspector performance hints Welcome window and setup helpers Archetype wizard with five ready presets Five sample scenes Sample prefabs Default settings and profiles Offline documentation AI Skills: four instruction files for coding agents such as Claude Code or Cursor Optional update notice in the editor, at most one version check a day, off in Project Settings Core runtime is render-pipeline agnostic Optional Input System helpers are isolated in separate assemblies Compatibility: Built for Unity 2022.3 LTS Compiles on Unity 2022.3 LTS, Unity 6.0 and Unity 6.6 URP required for the included swarm visuals (the VAT shader is URP-only) Core simulation is render-pipeline agnostic if you supply your own materials Samples need free packages: StarterKit uses TextMeshPro, and the Full Demo (the Shared, Egypt and Templates folders) uses TextMeshPro, Cinemachine 3.x and the Input System Optional helper content can be removed if not needed Every sample is a folder you can delete, and its package requirement goes with it Desktop and Android, with the mobile numbers measured on a release APK Requires URP. Tested on Unity 2022.3 LTS and Unity 6 LTS. Swarm visuals use a URP-only VAT shader. Built-in RP and HDRP aren't supported (agents render magenta without URP). The simulation core is pipeline-agnostic and compiles without URP, so you can supply your own materials.