Marchline

Deterministic pathfinding and crowd navigation for Unity, from one character to thousands.

Marchline moves the characters in your game: an enemy chasing the player, guards on patrol, NPCs, companions, tower defense creeps, colonists and whole armies. They find their way, avoid each other and arrive sensibly, in a few milliseconds a frame.

Get it on the Unity Asset Store

Why Marchline

• One-line API. agent.MoveTo(target). World scanning, planning, avoidance and arrival all happen behind it.
• Good with one character. Set a speed in world units per second and change it mid-route, Stop, Warp, and ask CanReach or PathLengthTo before you send anyone anywhere.
• Good with thousands. Group orders share flow fields automatically: 1,000 units to one point costs barely more than 50.
• Multi-storey. Floors joined by stairs, escalators, doors and teleporters, with queues at the doors.
• Bit-deterministic. Fixed-point core, identical across Windows, macOS, Linux and WebAssembly: lockstep multiplayer and replays without desyncs, checked by golden-hash tests on every commit.
• Live worlds. Build a wall and every character reroutes; a jammed chokepoint gets priced and the crowd swings to another way through.
• Honest failure. No route means Unreachable: reported at once, explained in the inspector, and retried automatically when the world opens up.

Sixty-second start

1. Install the package.
2. Empty GameObject → Add Component → Marchline → Nav World. It scans your obstacles on Play.
3. On any character: Add Component → Marchline → Marchline Agent.
4. Move it:

GetComponent<Marchline.MarchlineAgent>().MoveTo(target.position);

A whole group: navWorld.MoveGroup(selectedUnits, clickPoint). Add keepFormation: true to keep the shape.

Performance

Measured on an Apple M2 Max, release builds, from the repository bench suite: 10,000 actively repathing agents ≈ 0.5 ms/tick of planning; a full 10,000-agent simulation tick including separation, anticipatory steering and hard collision ≈ 1.8 ms; a 256×256 flow-field build ≈ 1.5 ms; 50,000 cached-follow agents ≈ 1.4 ms. Budgets are counted in deterministic work units, never wall-clock, so lockstep peers stay bit-identical.

Documentation

• Quickstart & recipes: a player and two enemies in five steps, then patterns for stealth AI, RTS squads, tower defense, hordes, colony sims, multi-storey worlds and lockstep
• Manual: setup, components, reachability, groups and formations, floors and links, dynamic worlds, debugging, performance
• Changelog: what changed in each version
• Migrating from Unity NavMesh
• Migrating from A* Pathfinding Project
• Determinism & lockstep guide

Version

These pages describe Marchline 2.0. It works in world units and seconds; 1.x worked in cells and ticks. If your copy is 1.x, see Upgrading from 1.x and the changelog.

Questions or studio licensing: support@marchline.dev