super fast A*

A bunch of low level optimizations bring search down to a ridiculously low ms
Maybe that’s already implemented in Unity but maybe it’ll inspire good stuff

Navigation meshes don’t rely on having a fast A* implementation, they just inherently solve the problem differently.

Unity navmesh was based on GitHub - recastnavigation/recastnavigation: Industry-standard navigation-mesh toolset for games. Who knows how much of the original code is left.