WOW Legends
A short list that's true for every WOW Legends server, solo or full house. The App handles the runtimes for you.
Windows 10 / 11 or Windows Server — 64-bit.
A modern multi-core chip — 4 cores minimum. More cores = more bots: the bot AI runs across the world-update threads.
SSD strongly recommended — a spinning hard drive can stall the database under load. Roughly 25–40 GB freeapprox. for the server, game data and the pre-populated database.
MySQL 8.x and the Microsoft Visual C++ 2015–2022 x64 Redistributable. Installing by hand? You'll grab these once (bundled with the free repack). Using the App? It sets them up automatically.
WoW Legends ships at 100 bots and scales to thousands — you pick the number to match your hardware (AiPlayerbot.MinRandomBots / MaxRandomBots). RAM is the figure people ask about most: the Total RAM column is the whole picture (worldserver + MySQL ~1–2 GB + the OS). Find the row that matches the world you want to run.
| Profile | AI bots | CPU | Total RAM | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Default ships at this | 100 | ~4 cores | 8 GB | Most modern PCs |
| Big realm | ~500–1,000 | 4–6 cores | 12–16 GB | A solid desktop or VPS |
| Living World BIG | ~3,000–5,000 | 6+ cores | 16+ GB | A busy, fully-populated world measured: ~9 GB for the server at 4,982 bots |
Every figure here is a setting you can tune — fewer bots means less RAM and CPU. Only the 4,982-bot figure below is measured; the rest is sensible guidance, and real load shifts with bot activity, how many players are online, and features like World PvP and World Events. Bot count is the biggest lever; an SSD mainly helps load times. Start at the default and scale up while watching Task Manager.
The table above is guidance; this one is measured. We pushed a realm to nearly 5,000 full-AI bots — World Events running, a real player online — and it stayed smooth on a mid-range 6-core box.
4,982 bots, World Events on, with a player online ran smoothly on a 6-core AMD Ryzen 5 3600X VM, ~14 GB RAM, SSD — the worldserver using about 9 GB RAM at ~64% CPU.
Those tiers really come down to just two settings. Understand these and you can size the server to whatever hardware you've got.
How many AI players populate your world — the single biggest driver of both RAM and CPU. Set it in playerbots.conf; the repack ships at 100. Turn it down for a lighter box, up for a busier world.
AiPlayerbot.MinRandomBots = 100 AiPlayerbot.MaxRandomBots = 100
Off by default. Turning it on uses ~3 GB more RAM but loads the entire world into memory up front — maximum stability and zero load-hitches as players and bots roam. Worth it on a big server with RAM to spare.
PreloadAllNonInstancedMapGrids = 1
The AI companions and bot chat need a language-model backend. This is independent of the profiles above — your server runs perfectly with AI chat off, or pointed at a cloud key that uses almost nothing locally. AI doesn't inflate your base requirements.
Point the bots at a provider like DeepSeek — extremely cheap, and it uses negligible local resources (the thinking happens on their servers). The simplest way to give bots a sharp brain.
Keep everything on your own machine with Ollama — adds roughly ~2 GB RAM. A GPU makes replies snappier but isn't required; it runs on CPU.
Prefer no AI at all? Turn it off and the server runs exactly as it always has — the AI layer is a bonus, never a barrier.
Start small on the box you already own, and grow the world as you go. Every number here is a dial, not a gate.