Null Safety

The majority of the PowBot API is considered NullSafe. This means that when streaming for objects within the game you should not expect to receive a null value the API will instead return a special object to signify the absence of a value.

Using the API

Example usage:

Npc goblin = Npcs.stream().name("Goblin").within(10).nearest().first()

Here we're streaming all Npcs and filtering them within 10 tiles where the Npcs name is Goblin choosing the nearest and then getting the first result. In other APIs if there were no goblins found within those conditions the variable goblin would be null but in the Powbot API this is not the case.

When you callk first on a stream if no matches are found, the API will return an instance of Npc.Nil instead of null. The Npc.Nil is effectively a blank NPC object and is completely safe to call methods on, calling the methods on the class would simply return default values.

Handling Nil

Here is how you can check against Nil values

Npc goblin = Npcs.stream().name("Goblin").within(10).nearest().first()

if (goblin == Npc.Nil) {
    System.out.println("We couldn't find a goblin")
    return
}

In the above snippet the code returns early if there are no goblins found. This ensures your script does not throw a NullPointerException if you try to call a method on a Nil goblin.