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Roblox Pathfinding Cost Calculator

Estimate how expensive your NPC pathfinding setup might be on the server. Tune NPC counts, recalc frequency, and path length to stay in a safe performance band.

This is a rough heuristic to reason about pathfinding load. It's not an official Roblox metric, but it gives you a consistent way to compare setups and tune NPC counts.

Estimated pathfinding load

Path ops per second

2.4 ops/s

Estimated load

24.0%

Low (comfortable)

Cost units / minute

144.0

Internal score: NPC count × recalcs/min × (path length ÷ 50).

“Safer” NPC cap (~50% load)

42

Rough guide only. You still need to profile on a real server in Studio / live games.

If you're hitting Low (comfortable) load, consider:

  • Reducing how often NPCs recalc their path.
  • Limiting active NPCs per player / zone.
  • Caching paths for common routes.

Share this estimate

Roblox pathfinding load estimate: 20 NPCs, 6.00 path recalcs/NPC/min, avg path length ~60 studs. Estimated 2.4 path ops/sec (~24.0% load, Low (comfortable)). Rough 'safer' NPC cap for ~50% load: 42. Calculated with ToolBLX Pathfinding Cost Calculator: https://toolblx.com/tools/pathfinding-cost-calculator

How this works

This calculator does not use any official Roblox pathfinding budget numbers. It's a consistent, opinionated heuristic to help you reason about cost.

cost_units = npc_count × recalcs_per_minute × (avg_path_length ÷ 50) ops_per_second ≈ cost_units ÷ 60 load_percent ≈ clamp((ops_per_second ÷ 10) × 100, 0, 100)

You can treat 10 ops/sec in this model as roughly 100% pathfinding load for a single server. That's arbitrary but consistent: it means you can compare different setups quickly and aim to keep your games in the low to medium band, then profile properly in Studio with the MicroProfiler.

Always treat these numbers as a starting point, not hard limits. Real performance depends on many factors: server hardware, other scripts, physics load, networking, and how your NPC logic is written.