Godot Navigation Pathfinding

This is a deep dive into Godot's NavigationServer API for developers building AI movement systems beyond basic tutorials. You get low-level RID patterns for performance-critical scenarios, async navmesh baking to avoid runtime stutters, terrain cost systems for strategic pathfinding, and RVO avoidance callbacks. The NEVER section is gold, covering gotchas like setting target_position before physics frames are ready and polling paths every frame. If you're building tower defense AI, RTS unit movement, or stealth detection with hundreds of agents, the server-side approach and reusable query objects will save you from GC spikes. Overkill for simple chase behaviors, but exactly what you need when node overhead becomes the bottleneck.