Multiplayer & Replication

Resource Gathering Minions is server-authoritative by design. The same setup works in single player with no extra steps, but networked games need to get authority and ownership right.

The authority rule

The Gatherer Component only runs its logic on an owner that has authority. In single player your pawns have authority automatically, so everything just works. In multiplayer, the server has authority, and the minion must be owned by the player who is commanding it so client requests can route to the server.

Try Begin Assignment is a reliable server function: calling it on a client forwards the call to the server, but only if the calling client owns the minion.

Spawning a minion that can take orders

When you spawn minions at runtime in multiplayer, set the new minion’s Owner to the controlling Player Controller. A typical server-side spawn does:

1. Spawn the minion character.
2. Possess it with an AI Controller.
3. Call Set Owner on the minion, passing the commanding Player Controller.

With ownership set, that player’s Try Begin Assignment calls reach the server and drive the minion. The plugin’s demo project (BP_Player) shows a client requesting the server to spawn a minion and assigning ownership this way.

A client has no authority, so input runs a Run on Server event rather than spawning the minion directly:

On the server, spawn the minion, possess it with an AI Controller, then set its owner to the commanding player:

Caution

Skip the Set Owner step and the minion silently does nothing on clients, because its server logic never gains authority. If a minion works in PIE as a listen-server host but not for a connected client, this is almost always why.

What replicates

Replicated	On	Why
Current Gathering State	Gatherer Component	So clients can play the right animation (idle / extracting / carrying).
Extractions Remaining	Resource Component	Drives the resource removing itself on every machine when it is used up.
Gatherer reference	Extracted Resource Component	Lets the carried actor react to being dropped on all machines.

The Gatherer also sets the spawned carried actor and any Home Actor to replicate when it creates them, so you do not have to. The one thing you must do yourself is enable Replicates on your resource actor (the tree, the rock): without it, Extractions Remaining cannot replicate and the resource will not disappear on clients when it is exhausted.

Ownership during a harvest

Ownership shifts briefly during extraction so the right machine can run the right code:

• When the minion overlaps a resource, it sets itself as the owner of that resource actor so the resource’s server-side extraction can execute, then clears that ownership when the minion leaves.
• The spawned carried actor is owned by the minion’s owner (the commanding player), keeping the whole chain under that player’s authority.

This is handled internally; it is described here so the ownership changes you may see at runtime are not a surprise.

Note

The current design assumes one minion harvests a given resource at a time. If two minions can target the same resource simultaneously in your game, plan to extend the ownership handling accordingly.