Bashed Earth

Turn-based artillery combat in your terminal, in the grand tradition of Scorched Earth and Worms — rendered as real pixels via the kitty graphics protocol. No SDL, no X11, no ncurses: the whole game is a software-rasterized, antialiased framebuffer zlib-compressed and streamed to the terminal as base64 APC escape sequences at a steady 30 fps (double-buffered image ids + DEC 2026 synchronized updates, so no flicker; encoding runs on its own thread, so no stutter).

Built for kilix (and any kitty-protocol terminal: kitty, ghostty, wezterm...). Linux only.

Features

• Falling-sand destructible terrain — 1px cellular automaton with grass/sand/ice worlds, lakes, flowing water, snow, and ice that shatters into avalanches when explosions cut it loose
• 15 weapons — from the Baby Missile to the Nuke: Triple, Bouncy, Roller (rolls downhill into dug-in tanks), Drill, Digger, Napalm (spreads burning fire that creeps downhill and is doused by water), Dirt, MIRV, plus Raft / Parachute / Shield utility items
• Weapon store & economy — $10k per match, leftover cash and unused ammo carry across matches, winner bonus, multi-match scoreboard
• 5 AI personalities — Aggressive, Defensive, Tactical, Balanced, Trickster; each with its own shopping list, weapon priorities, aim accuracy, taunts, and name pool
• Weather — wind that pushes shells, rain that fills craters, snow that buries ice worlds
• Hazards — fall damage (parachutes save you), buried-alive damage, self-hits, and a stalemate rule so dug-in wars end
• Locally generated sound bank — 15 reviewed shot, explosion, impact, splash, ricochet, drill, UI, and victory WAVs load at startup; any missing or invalid asset uses the built-in synthesized fallback. Everything is mixed live and streamed to whatever audio sink your system has (pacat / pw-play / aplay / sox play); silently disabled if none

Build

Linux only. Needs gcc or clang, zlib, libm, and pthreads:

make
./bashed-earth

Sound plays through the first available CLI sink (pacat, pw-play, aplay, or sox's play) — no sink, no sound, no problem.

Controls

Key	Action
Left / Right	aim barrel
Up / Down	power
Space / Enter	fire
1-0	weapon hotkeys
D / R	Drill / Roller
Tab	cycle weapons
M	toggle sound
Q	quit

Menus: arrows to navigate, Left/Right to change values, Enter to confirm. Options persist to ~/.config/bashed-earth.conf.

Development

make test                          # headless AI-vs-AI selftest matches
./bashed-earth --selftest 42 3     # specific seed, 3 matches
./bashed-earth --render-test 7     # dump render_*.ppm screenshots
BE_DEBUG=1 ./bashed-earth --selftest 1 1   # tick-by-tick state trace

The selftest plays full 4-AI matches headlessly (store, combat, economy, carry-over) and checks invariants — no terminal needed, so it runs in CI.

Architecture

File	Role
src/term.c	key decoding around the vendored kitty-framebuffer session
src/terrain.c	falling-sand automaton with per-row active-span tracking
src/game.c	tanks, projectiles, flames, explosions, AI, store, turn flow
src/render.c	scene, HUD, menus, and Scale2x/3x text over vendored soft-raster primitives
src/sound.c	reviewed WAV bank + procedural fallback routed through vendored pcm-mixer
src/config.c	weapon/AI/color data tables
src/main.c	30 fps loop (60 Hz logic), selftest, render-test

The four shared runtime libraries are pinned under third_party/, so a normal checkout remains self-contained.

License

Code is MIT; the shipped SFX bank is CC0-derived. See LICENSE and the per-file audio provenance. The embedded terminal font comes from Debian console-setup's public-domain console fonts (details in third_party/soft-raster/src/font8x16.h).