RepoBots

Bot teammates for R.E.P.O. that play like real players.

A bot is a real PlayerAvatar — same robot body, name tag, colour, health bar, death head and grab beam as a human. The game treats it like a remote player who's on a laggy connection: monsters see, chase and hurt it, it shows up in spectate, it has to be in the truck before the level can end, and when it dies its head drops so you can carry it to extraction to revive it.

The host runs every bot's brain and streams its movement to everyone else.

Status: v0.3.2, loads and hosts in-game; bot behaviour still being tested. It compiles and every Harmony patch applies cleanly against a decompiled (older, April 2025) Assembly-CSharp.dll, but it hasn't been run inside the game yet. Expect a round or two of fixes — see Reporting problems.

What bots do

Chat commands

Type in the normal in-game chat. Address one bot by name (clanker follow), all of them (bots follow, everyone stay), or the nearest one (bot follow).

Bots talk like players

Each bot gets its own voice object (the same one every player has, with the microphone part switched off) and talks through the game's normal chat, so lines are spoken by TTS from where the bot is standing, with the floating chat text above its head, mouth movement, and a whisper when it's crouching. Monsters can hear it too.

What they say: "I found something!" (or "I found something worth about three grand!"), "There's a Huntsman! Run!", "Oh no, Sam is down!", "Hang on Sam, grabbing your head!", "Taking this to extraction.", "That's everything, back to the truck!", replies to your commands, and the odd bit of idle chatter. All the lines are in src/BotLines.cs if you want to rewrite them.

The voice takes ~3 seconds to set up after a bot joins; anything it says before that shows as a speech bubble instead. Turn TTS off with Chat.UseGameChat = false.

Keys (host)

Install (try it now)

1. In r2modman / Thunderstore Mod Manager: Settings → Import local mod → pick RepoBots-0.3.2-prebuilt.zip.
2. Everyone in the lobby needs the mod. Players without it see the bot frozen at the spawn.
3. Host a lobby (a private lobby on your own works — singleplayer mode isn't supported) and start a level.

The prebuilt DLL was compiled against an older game version. At startup RepoBots checks that everything it uses still exists in your game. If not, it switches itself off (the game is unaffected), shows a red notice in the corner, and lists what changed in LogOutput.log under RepoBots ... doesn't match this version of R.E.P.O.. Send that list, or build from source against your own game files (below), and the compiler will point at the same things.

Build from source

Needs the .NET SDK (6 or newer) and R.E.P.O. installed.

# default GameDir is C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\REPO
dotnet build -c Release -p:GameDir="D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\REPO"

Or copy GameDir.props.user.example to GameDir.props.user and set GameDir (and optionally ProfileDir to your r2modman profile so every build is copied straight into BepInEx/plugins/RepoBots).

package.ps1 builds and zips a Thunderstore package into dist/.

The game assembly is publicized at build time (BepInEx.AssemblyPublicizer.MSBuild), so the code reads the game's internal fields directly.

How it works

Host                                             Every client (incl. host)
────                                             ─────────────────────────
PhotonNetwork.Instantiate(PlayerAvatar,          PUN builds the avatar → our PhotonView patch
  data: ["RepoBots.v1", name, id, colour])  ───► sees the marker and forces IsMine = false
                                                 before any Awake runs → game code takes the
BotBrain (host only)                              "remote player" path for it everywhere
  think 5 Hz: threats → truck → mode → loot
  act every frame: navmesh path, look, grab     BotPuppet writes position / look / stance /
  publishes BotState ───────────────────────►     velocity / grab puller into the same fields
                       RaiseEvent @ 20 Hz         PlayerAvatar.OnPhotonSerializeView fills

Patches (each one separately, so a game update only breaks the feature it touches):

Grabbing goes through the game's own grab system (GrabLink → GrabStartedRPC → beam RPCs, then the master's physics pulls the object to the bot's puller point), so the beam and "who's holding what" look normal to everyone.

Config

BepInEx/config/Jillybob.RepoBots.cfg (also editable in r2modman's config editor).

Known limitations

• Singleplayer isn't supported — host a private lobby instead.
• Everyone needs the mod, or they see a frozen bot.
• Bots move along the navmesh, so they don't jump or climb. They push doors and props but can't vault over things. Enemy grabs that pull a player around on their own client don't move bots.
• Bots buy and use upgrades and use weapons in the arena, but don't use other items (flashlights, drones, grenades) during levels.
• Bots play both after-failure minigames (arena fight and scooter race), but they drive fairly simply: no boost pads or deliberate drifting.
• Big two-person valuables are skipped (MaxCarryMass).
• Enemies that hook into a player's voice chat may misbehave around bots.

Reporting problems

Turn on VerboseLogging, play until it goes wrong, then send:

Don't copy the log out of the black BepInEx console window: it only keeps the last ~9,000 lines, so the startup part (where the useful errors are) is gone. Attach the file instead: r2modman → Settings → Browse profile folder → BepInEx\LogOutput.log.

1. The whole BepInEx/LogOutput.log from the host's r2modman profile — the important part is the top (load + patch lines) and the RepoBots diagnostics block it writes ~3 s after bots join
2. A screenshot with the F5 overlay open
3. Your game version, and whether it was the prebuilt DLL or your own build (and any build errors)

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Not affiliated with semiwork. No game code or assets are included.