Basic Needs Simulation AI

Unless you want to buy a plugin off the marketplace, lots of wheel reinventing is going to be involved. Even with a premade plugin or tutorial, you’ll need to reinvent a few wheels anyway to get it to suit your needs.

But, yea, it’s entirely possible to make a needs system using behavior trees. Starting from a basic combat-based AI system which there’s a million tutorials on, one would branch off from a patrol/wander type node, then have selectors to run branches further down based on need priorities.

If I were to make such a thing, I’d probably run a service near the top of the tree which ticks rather slowly to check things like hunger/energy/etc… and sets flags for the selectors downstream to use for decision making.

In a sense, it’s not much different than a patrol system from a combat behavior tree; only instead of visiting patrol points, the pawn would goto a bed or a food source or whatevs if it needs it.