Pluto is a StarCraft: Brood War AI. A single neural network, trained by self-play reinforcement learning, plays the whole game — macro and micro, all three races; there is no scripted play. It plays 1v1 melee through BWAPI.
Status: binary beta. This repo currently hosts binary releases for testing — grab the latest from the Releases page.
- StarCraft: Brood War 1.16.1 + BWAPI 4.4.0
- An NVIDIA GPU (GeForce GTX 10-series / Pascal or newer)
- NVIDIA driver 525 or newer (late 2022; ships CUDA 12.0)
- ~2.5 GB free GPU memory, ~1.2 GB disk space
- 64-bit Windows, or Wine (StarCraft is 32-bit; the inference engine is a separate 64-bit process)
Unpack the release zip into your StarCraft folder's bwapi-data/AI/
(the usual place for bots), so the files land like this:
bwapi-data/AI/pluto.dll 32-bit BWAPI module
bwapi-data/AI/pluto/pluto_infer.exe 64-bit GPU inference engine
bwapi-data/AI/pluto/pluto_weights.bin network weights
Point bwapi.ini at the DLL as usual: ai = bwapi-data/AI/pluto.dll
Register the bot as Zerg, Terran, Protoss, or Random — it plays all of them.
The binaries are unsigned, so Windows SmartScreen or antivirus software may warn on first run.
On game start, pluto.dll launches pluto_infer.exe (found next to the DLL) and talks to it over stdio pipes. No network connections are made and no files outside the StarCraft folder are touched. The engine process exits with the game.
If the engine cannot start (no NVIDIA GPU, driver too old, missing weights), the bot reports the reason in game chat and in the logs, then leaves the game after ~10 seconds.
| file | what |
|---|---|
pluto.log |
DLL log (StarCraft folder) |
pluto_infer.log |
engine log (StarCraft folder) |
bwapi-data/write/pluto_bandit_<opponent>.txt |
per-opponent build-order stats |
The bot picks its opening with a bandit over the per-opponent win/loss counts; every build is listed with its mask and name, so you can edit the numbers to steer it (the file is re-read every game). The standard tournament write/ → read/ copy persists it across games.
- The bot uncaps game speed and paces itself by inference (~15 ms per model step on a modern GPU; one step every 6 frames).
- Games of the same matchup must not run in parallel on one install (standard tournament-manager behavior). Different opponents in parallel are fine.
- A mid-game engine failure exits the StarCraft process — it counts as a crash, deliberately, rather than leaving the game as a loss.