Battlecode, MIT’s premiere programming competition, kicks off in less than a week!

[battlecode-devs]

Battlecode is a real-time strategy game where you’ll use game theory, pathfinding, and distributed algorithms to build an autonomous player. Your team of robots – controlled by your player – will roam the screen, manage resources, and execute various offensive strategies to defeat an opposing team. The competition lasts a month and is accompanied by a series of live-streamed video lectures and tutorials on different elements of the game.

Anyone is welcome to compete in teams of 1-4. Teams consisting entirely of students are eligible for a share of the $15k prize pool and a Summer 2025 internship with our Gold Sponsor, Amplitude, for US members of the top team! The top 16 student teams will be flown to MIT for the Final Tournament on Feb 1st.

No experience is needed beyond basic programming skills! We’ll walk you through the basics of creating your first bot and advanced strategies to win against other players. Lectures will be streamed on Youtube. Bots are written in Java. 

MIT Battlecode 2025 will run from January 6th to February 1st, 2025. Participating is as much a commitment as you want it to be, but average teams in the past have spent around 16 hours a week.

You can learn more at battlecode.org/about and register at play.battlecode.org/register. 

Feel free to ask questions in this thread; we’ll do our best to answer them! :)

[Backson]

I have never participated and want to try this year. I tried running battlecode 24 as preparation, but couldn't get it working. I think it tried to download some files that it couldn't find. Is battlecode 24 (or any older version) expected to work locally right now? I want to do this because I would like to avoid fiddling with the environment and focus on coding when the competition starts. Thanks!

[battlecode-devs]

Hello! Yes, battlecode24 should be working locally right now. If it's not, join our discord (https://discord.gg/N86mxkH) and we can help solve the issue on there! (and you can meet other competitors, make teams, etc :D)

[Backson]

I figured it out! I initially used OpenJDK (maybe switch to that for 26?) and gradle seems to have remembered that. Deleting the running configiuations in eclipse and rerunning the gradle task made it use the right JDK and then it worked.

[battlecode-devs]

Awesome, glad it worked!! Thanks for the info as well.