October 19, 2026

🤖 Rise of the Bots

Quetoo’s bots have just been rewritten from the ground up, and boy are they good. The new system now generates navigation data at map load, for any map, mod and movement type. Bots received an entirely new brain that groks long and short term goals, advanced movement like strafe jumping, and human-like aim. And they power Quetoo’s new Practice mode, a Quake 3 style single-player campaign that runs from massive free-for-all brawls up to a 1v1 showdown with the Bastard.

And what a bastard he is. He times items and strafe jumps to beat you to them. He dodges projectiles and splash damage. He even knows how to spring traps on The Frag Pipe and Claustrophobopolis. We think you’ll agree that he earns his name.

For players

Practice mode

Open Play and select the Practice tab. Choose a ladder, pick a tier, and see what you’re made of. Five ladders ship today:

Most ladders open with seven-player free-for-alls, tighten up to four players, and finish 1v1. Every match plays to 20 frags, so they’re quick, and every tier is open from the start. Work your way up, or skip straight to the beating.

To clear a map, finish the match with the top score, outright. A tie is a loss. The intermission shows Victory or Defeat, and you press 1 for the next match, 2 to retry, or 3 to exit. Each ladder keeps its own progress, and except for Instagib, you can play any ladder under the gameplay of your choice, each with its own record of cleared maps.

Practice works in Lithium, too.

The Practice tab, showing the Quetoo ladder with its three tiers of maps and the selected match on One Must Fall against Guard, Bldseekr and Gammy

Pick your Bots

The Create Server menu now has a bot picker above the map list. Each of the 24 bots on the roster gets a card with its portrait, its name, and bars for its skill, aggression and awareness, sorted from the pushovers up to Bastard. The bots you select always join, and random picks fill out the rest of the bot count.

The Create Server menu, with the bot picker above the map list and Creech and Stroggo selected

Match stats

When a match ends, the intermission shows your stats in a panel beside the scoreboard: damage dealt and taken, accuracy, favorite weapon, and a row for each weapon you used. Your favorite weapon is the one that did the most damage. And yes, a rail through two enemies counts as two hits, so your accuracy can top 100%. We won’t tell.

The match stats panel at intermission, with damage dealt and taken, accuracy, favorite weapon, and accuracy, damage and kills for each weapon

Smarter bots

Navigation that builds itself. The nav mesh is generated at level load from the movement that’s active right now, so every mod and every movement mode gets proper bot navigation for free. The mesh knows every class of jump: strafe jumps, water jumps, ladder climbs, you name it.

A brain with a memory. Bots run on a new state machine, and they remember a lot more than they used to. They stick to long-term goals while handling short-term distractions and obstacles. Case in point: the red armor on Claustrophobopolis. A bot hits the switch, runs halfway around the map, grabs the rocket launcher on the way, and rides the extended plank up to the armor. Nobody scripted that. They worked it out.

Strafe jumping. Higher-skilled bots strafe jump on clear, open stretches of their route. Don’t be surprised if Bastard races you to the quad.

Map traps. Crushers, the Frag Pipe, and friends. When you’re standing in a trap’s path, a bot that can reach its button will press it, or shoot it if it has to. Prepare to be humiliated 😛

Smarter combat. Bots arm themselves before they go hunting. They fight back when caught unarmed, retreat when outgunned or low on health, and dodge projectiles, so lobbing rockets down a hallway isn’t a free frag anymore.

Aim that looks human. No more flick shots. Bot movement and aim are smooth and human-like, so chasecamming them is actually enjoyable. Each weapon has a ballistics profile, and the bots use it to lead their targets and aim splash weapons at your feet. Don’t be surprised when Bastard air-rockets you off the mega health on The Longest Yard.

A roster with personalities. All 24 bots have their own skill, aggression and awareness, along with their own model and colors. Skill runs from .10 at the bottom of the roster to .99 for Bastard.

For mappers and server admins

No more nav authoring. Bots navigate any map out of the box, and the old .nav files are gone. Ship a map, and the bots know how to play it.

The generated nav mesh drawn in game, with its nodes and the walk and jump links between them, and the nav node readout in the corner

Traps. Tag a mover with "ai_hint" "trap" to let bots spring it. Doors, plats, walls and water all qualify, and bots follow the button through up to four trigger_relays to find it.

Choose the bots. A level’s ai key, in the map list or on worldspawn, names the bots that always join that level. See Bots in the server admin docs.

For modders

Practice ladders are plain text. A ladder is a practice-<name>.lst file in the map list format: a title entity, optionally with a gameplay that every match plays, then one entity for each match, with its tier, map, ai players, and an optional frag_limit or time_limit. A ladder holds up to three tiers of three maps, with up to six bots a match. Drop one in your game directory and it shows up in the Practice tab. The five that ship are in quetoo-data.

See you in the arena. 🔫

—jdolan