How Many Bot (AI) Players Are in My Game?

Fortnite first announced that they were going to be adding Bots to the game “next Season”, which ended up being Chapter 2 Season 1. (These Bots are often referred to as AI by the community, because the term ‘bots’ has often been used to refer to low-skill players.) Bots were added in combination with Skill-Based Match Making (SBMM) to give players more ability to develop their skills. In this article, Fortnite specifically says “as your skill improves, you’ll face fewer Bots.” This is the first signal to be aware that all public matches (aka “pubs”) have Bots in them. This is true even if you think that you don’t have Bots in your lobbies (presumably this assumption is made because the player is at a high enough skill level that Bots aren’t necessary for their matches).

Different Ways to Idenity Bots

So how do you confirm that you did indeed have Bots, how many were in your match and specifically which players these Bots are?

Bots Cannot Use ‘Anonymous’ Mode

This is probably obvious, but in case it’s not, Bots will not show up as ‘Anonymous’. This is because, by default, player names are not anonymized. For a player to make their name anonymous they must specifically enable a setting, which the Bots can’t/don’t do. So if you eliminate, or are eliminated by an ‘Anonymous’ player, that’s definitely not a Bot.

Bots Do Not Wear the Current Season’s Battle Pass Skins

Battle Pass skins are only useable by players that have the Battle Pass. Bots can’t buy the Battle Pass, so the current season’s Battle Pass skins (such as Tarana, Raz, Agent Jones, Rebirth Raven, etc.) are never going to be worn by a Bot. In fact, Bots very frequently wear the previous season’s Battle Pass skins. It’s unknown why this is the case, but you’ll notice once you start paying attention to the Bots.

Bot Names are Not a Good Indicator

Ever since Bots were added to the game in Chapter 2, people have speculated about how to identify bots and one of the common thoughts was that Bot names match a specific format. It was often thought that a name with one or two words followed by a number (e.g. TallestAnt4, MaybeNot40, BestDoggo83). While this is often true, there’s nothing in the game that prevents a real player from setting their name to something similar to this. Additionally, Bots actually have several formats for their names. Some additional examples are HippoMagician, Sn00tyMagician, Quack4Bread, Allsmyles:D. You can use the name as a hint, especially if over time you start to see the same names over and over in your differnet games, but it’s not a very good indicator all by itself.

Use the Player List in Replays with Squad ID Enabled

The method to absolutely identify Bots is only available if you have Replays enabled. Sadly, Replays aren’t even available on Nintendo Switch, so those players are out of luck. With Replays enabled, after you leave a match, go into the replay for that match and enable Squad ID to show. You can do this by selecting the camera icon, going to the third tab, and at the botton you’ll see Squad ID. Set that to On.

Now that the Squad ID is enabled, go into the map and you’ll see the player list and their Squad ID number. If you sort the list by the Squad ID, you can scroll to the end of the list to find that the Squad ID goes up to 100. The Squad ID is crucial for identifying the Bots because Bots always fill the highest number Squad ID. So, looking at the screenshot below, you can see and perhaps recognize the Bot names. This also means that actual players fill the Squad ID from the lower numbers going up. With that being the case, the speculation part that comes into play now is determining where in the Squad ID list the last real player is listed and then from that point on, the rest of the players are actually Bots. In the screenshot below, I recognize numerous bot names, including IHaveFullBrick with Squad ID #78. The two above it are probably also Bots, but I don’t recognize them off-hand.

Up further in the list, at some point you’ll recognize an obvious real player name, either because it’s something that includes a clan/org name (like “FaZe Johanthon69420”), or it includes Twitch/TTV/YT in the name, etc. Finding the exact point where real players are divided from Bots isn’t always easy, but there are a few other things we can check in the replay or in a live game.

Bot Behavior in a Match

The best indicator of a Bot that you can see in a live game as well as in Replays is how the Bot behaves. First, when gliding in from the bus Bots will often do a “bot flip” meaning that if you watch the Bot glide, if it suddenly reverses direction, this is usually a good indicator that they are a Bot. It is possible that a player could intentionally mimic this, but it’s unlikely. Second, Bots will fire their weapons in seemingly random patterns when multiple opponents are nearby. At one moment they’ll be firing at one player, and then instantly they’ll be firing at a different player without normal changes in turning, rotating, etc. This is very easy to witness in duos, trios or squads because if one person on your team is fighting a Bot, that Bot will very often switch firing at different team members if they are close enough. Third, Bots routinely shoot at players through objects that a real player can’t see through. For example, if you are being fired at randomly front a direction that is clearly obscured by trees, bushes, walls, etc., this is a good indicator that they are a Bot. Lastly, there are several actions in a game that real players do, but Bots will never do. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it gives you an idea of the different things Bots don’t do. Bots don’t drive vehicles. Bots don’t use rifts. Bots don’t talk to Characters. Bots don’t reboot their teammates. Bots don’t use rotation items like Launchpads, Crashpads, Bouncers, Guardian Towers, etc.

Bots Do Not Fill Your Party

This isn’t useful in Solos, but it’s useful to know that Bots won’t fill for a Party. So if you load into Squads with Fill on and you’re by yourself, any players that fill with you are real players. This is mostly important to know because when you look at the player list in Replays for Duos, Trios or Squads, if you recognize one Bot name, you know for certain that all players in that same party are Bots.

Minimum/Maximum Number of Bots in any Match

I have used the Replays Squad ID method numerous times to understand how many Bots are in my games. Based on my experience, the minimum number of Bots in every single match is 12. The maximum number of Bots in games is above 50. At one point during May 2020, SypherPK (and many others) believed that Epic had disabled SBMM because matches were so easy for a few days. When SypherPK made this claim, within a few days the easy games went away and people began expressing a lot of frustration towards SypherPK because it was believed that Epic became aware of his claim and reverted the change. His claim was completely wrong. There’s almost no way to tell if Fortnite disables SBMM, because we don’t know much about how SBMM works. However, what actually did happen, was that Fortnite changed the minimum and maximum number of Bots that load into every match. I noticed this looking at the Replays, using the Squad IDs, and I could see that there were a minimum of about 50 Bots and a maximum of 84. It was clear every single game. In fact, on my stream three viewers and I would load into a match, split-drop on different Choppas and fly around the map trying to eliminate as many Bot squads as possible to see how many elims we could get. We maxed out at 44 sadly because so many Bots would eliminate other Bots, and the henchmen (Chapter 2 Season 2) would eliminate them as well. I create a video from our highest elimination match, which you can find below: