This code is generated by an AI. All of mini-soldat (the game, its tests, its build, this page) is written by Claude Code, Anthropic's coding agent, under the direction of Yoann Padioleau, who chooses what is built and reviews it.
How to play
You are the red soldier, against three of Soldat's bots. The first to 10 kills wins, or who has most after 10 minutes. Press space to start. The keys are Soldat's:
| a d | run left and right |
| w | jump |
| s | crouch |
| x | lie down, and get up |
| mouse | aim: a soldier faces its cursor |
| left button | shoot |
| right button, or shift | the jets, while the fuel lasts |
| r | reload |
| q | the other weapon, the pistol on your back |
| e | a grenade: held longer, thrown harder |
| f | throw your weapon away: empty hands pick up another, lying on the ground |
| 1 to 9, 0 | the weapon to appear with, as in Soldat's menu |
g goes round the graphics, the game as each step of its making drew it: the soldiers as skeletons on flat colours; their pictures; the map's texture and scenery.
And its moves: s and a side while running, a roll; w and a side, a jump sideways; the jets' key during a jump sideways with the other side held, a backflip; lying, a side crawls.
Walk over a medikit when hurt, or a kit of grenades when short of them. On the title, m asks for the next map: ctf_Ash is for capture the flag, Soldat's own favourite: you are of Alpha, in red; take Bravo's blue flag by walking on it and bring it to your own, at home, while they come for yours. Walk on your own flag, dropped, to send it home. The game has sound (a browser lets it start at your first key; without it). Some variants: seven bots instead of three; one bot of another making, the blue "Engine", which knows only what it has seen and reacts as late as a hand does (it runs on elm-playground's library for bots, where Soldat's own read the whole game each tick); the paths the bots walk, drawn by the map's author, with the keys each point tells them to hold; the points the game tests, drawn over the soldiers.
Where it is
At its beginning. It started as elm-playground's TinySoldat, a toy, of which nothing is left: all is Soldat's own by now. The map: Arena2, read from its file and drawn as Soldat draws it, its texture on its polygons and its scenery. The soldier: how it moves (its run, the wind-up of its jump, its roll, its jets, by Soldat's rules and numbers, adapted from its Pascal) and how it looks (its pictures, one on each limb of its skeleton, played by its 44 animations, its head and its arms turned to the cursor). And the weapons: Soldat's ten and its pistol, with its own numbers, their clips and reloads, the shotgun's pellets, the Barrett's wait, grenades and the M79, bullets that ricochet and go through a body, explosions that throw one about. And the deathmatch: Soldat's own bots with their characters, walking their map's waypoints; weapons dropped and picked up, medikits, grenade kits. And it is heard: Soldat's own recordings, by where they come from; with its shells, its blood, its smoke and its explosions. And it has teams and flags, and can be played over the network on a server of its own (not from this page: see the source's docs/network.md). The goal is the real game: Soldat's maps and soldier as they look, its weapons, its feel, and play over the network. The source is at github.com/aryx/mini-soldat.
Credits
Soldat is the work of Michał "MM" Marcinkowski, who wrote it and released it in 2002, and of Transhuman Design, his studio. The game, its design, its feel, its maps and its soldier are theirs; mini-soldat only imitates them, and is neither affiliated with nor endorsed by them.
Soldat's sources were opened under the MIT license and are maintained as OpenSoldat by its contributors; its content is opensoldat/base, under CC BY 4.0. Both are the reference this clone is written from. Go and play the real one: its releases.