MultiBot

What it is

Playerbots are normally controlled by chat: you whisper a bot a command and it answers in chat. MultiBot is a client addon that puts those controls into windows and buttons. It comes in two parts:

• MultiBot Chatless, the addon inside your game client. It is the part you see.
• MultiBot bridge, the mod-multibot-bridge package on the server. The addon talks to it through hidden addon messages instead of chat, and the bridge answers with exact data from the server: the bot's bags, gear, talents, quests, strategies and so on.

You need both. Without the addon the bridge has nothing to show; without the bridge the addon cannot use its bridge features.

What you can do with it

Among other things, from the addon's windows you can:

• see your bots in rosters (your own alts, group, guild, friends, favorites) and log them in and out;
• look into a bot's bags, bank and guild bank, move, equip, use, trade, sell or destroy items;
• apply a premade talent spec or your own talents;
• browse and craft a bot's profession recipes, and have it enchant through the trade window;
• read its quests, stats, skills, reputations and spellbook, and abandon quests;
• change its strategies, loot rules, formation and roll settings.

The bridge only lets you control bots you already have the right to control, such as the characters of your own account, members of your guild and bots you added by class. It does not run arbitrary playerbots commands.

Install the bridge

Install MultiBot bridge from the Plugins page (Installing packages). It needs the playerbots package; the launcher installs that as well if you do not have it yet. Restart the server.

Install the addon

LonelyIce does not ship the addon, so you add it to your game client yourself.

1. Open Wishmaster117/MultiBot-Chatless on GitHub and choose Code, then Download ZIP.
2. Unpack the zip. It holds a folder named MultiBot-Chatless-main (or similar).
3. Rename that folder to exactly MultiBot. The addon does not load under any other name.
4. Move it into the Interface\AddOns folder of your game client, so that you end up with Interface\AddOns\MultiBot\MultiBot.toc.
5. Start the game. On the character screen, AddOns should list MultiBot as enabled.

If you know git, you can clone the repository straight into Interface\AddOns\MultiBot instead, and update it later with git pull.

LonelyIce only manages the addons that its own packages bring; an addon you copy in yourself is left alone.

Use it

In the game, open MultiBot with any of these commands, or with its minimap button:

/multibot
/mbot
/mb

The addon checks which features the bridge offers before it uses them. The package is built from a fixed version of the bridge, so a newer addon may offer something that your bridge does not support yet; that part then stays unavailable. Some playerbots chat still appears now and then: the project describes itself as mostly chatless, and a few commands deliberately still go through chat.

Settings

The bridge has one setting. In the launcher: Settings, group MultiBot bridge under Plugins (or the gear button next to the package on the Plugins page). It takes effect when you save (the .reload badge): with the world running, the launcher reloads the config for you.

The premade talent specs the addon offers come from the playerbots settings (the AiPlayerbot.PremadeSpecLink keys in playerbots.conf).

If something does not work

• The addon does not appear. Check the folder name (MultiBot, nothing else) and that MultiBot.toc is directly inside it, not in a subfolder.
• The addon says the bridge is unavailable. Check on the Plugins page that MultiBot bridge and playerbots are installed and enabled, and that the server was restarted after installing them.

Credits and license

The bridge is Wishmaster117/mod-multibot-bridge by Wishmaster117; its repository does not state a license, so its code stays under its author's terms. The addon is Wishmaster117/MultiBot-Chatless, maintained by Wishmaster117 and built on the original MultiBot addon by Macx-Lio; it is licensed under GPL-3.0. LonelyIce builds the bridge unchanged from its own repository.