Overview

Competed in MIT Battlecode 2026, placing top 6 at US Qualifiers and top 12 at Finals.

Battlecode is a month-long programming competition where teams iteratively design and develop AI algorithms to control virtual robots in a fast, turn-based strategy game. This year’s theme involved warring rat factions fighting over territory, resources, and survival, all while contending with erratic NPC cats.

All bot code can be found under /src. Battlecode has 4 main tournaments, including 2 sprint tournaments, the qualifier tournament, and the final tournament. My bots initially had fun food-themed names (I competed as team food), but I renamed the files for clarity.

Name	Description
examplefuncsplayer	Starter bot provided by the organizers that randomly moves around.
rushbot	My first bot. Prioritizes rushing the 3 possible enemy king starting locations.
sprint1bot	Less aggressive; more focus on collecting cheese and natural exploration.
benchbot	Minor bug fixes. Used as a benchmark for all future bots.
sprint2bot	Complete rewrite with cleaner code and a heuristic-based combat system.
usqualsbot	Lots of bug fixes, fine-tuned behaviors, and new features.
finalsbot	Same as above.

You can find a mix of custom and official maps under /maps.

Battlecode 2026 Scaffold - Java

This is the Battlecode 2026 Java scaffold, containing an examplefuncsplayer. Read https://play.battlecode.org/bc26/quick_start !

Project Structure

• README.md This file.
• build.gradle The Gradle build file used to build and run players.
• src/ Player source code.
• test/ Player test code.
• client/ Contains the client. The proper executable can be found in this folder (don't move this!)
• build/ Contains compiled player code and other artifacts of the build process. Can be safely ignored.
• matches/ The output folder for match files.
• maps/ The default folder for custom maps.
• gradlew, gradlew.bat The Unix (OS X/Linux) and Windows versions, respectively, of the Gradle wrapper. These are nifty scripts that you can execute in a terminal to run the Gradle build tasks of this project. If you aren't planning to do command line development, these can be safely ignored.
• gradle/ Contains files used by the Gradle wrapper scripts. Can be safely ignored.

How to get started

You are free to directly edit examplefuncsplayer. However, we recommend you make a new bot by copying examplefuncsplayer to a new package under the src folder.

Useful Commands

• ./gradlew build Compiles your player
• ./gradlew run Runs a game with the settings in gradle.properties
• ./gradlew update Update configurations for the latest version -- run this often
• ./gradlew zipForSubmit Create a submittable zip file
• ./gradlew tasks See what else you can do!

Configuration

Look at gradle.properties for project-wide configuration.

If you are having any problems with the default client, please report to teh devs and feel free to set the compatibilityClient configuration to true to download a different version of the client.