I kept reading that Godot pathfinding falls apart with a lot of agents, so I actually measured it. 500 agents each calling AStarGrid2D.get_id_path() every frame gave me a 670 ms median frame on an 8-year-old desktop — a slideshow. Swap those 500 per-agent queries for one shared field the whole crowd reads, and the same agents drop to ~2 ms, nothing over the 16.6 ms budget. The fix was the shape of the work, not a faster solver — and the same approach holds 10,000 agents at 77 FPS in a browser tab, pure GDScript.

Full write-up with the measured ladder out to 20,000 agents, a playable demo (drag the goal, flip naive vs scheduled, push the count yourself), and the benchmark JSON for every count: https://vav-labs.com/blog/moving-10000-agents-in-godot/