Bots and moderation¶

Each ranked board has two categories. Human runs are played live by a person through a stock client. Bot runs are everything else: a program steering the inputs, tool-assisted runs (TAS) and any mix of the two. Both categories follow the same ranked rules and the same verification. The category only decides which board a run is listed on.

The site shows both side by side: the home page has the top humans and the top bots, and every board page lists its human runs and then its bot runs, each bot run under the bot its replay names.

A bot doesn't have to hide. A harness that declares itself goes straight to the bot board under its own name. The human board relies on moderators, who see each run's input signals and can move a whole account or a single run between categories.

Decisions¶

• Two categories: human and bot. TAS is a bot run. Each board (Survival, each quest, each hardcore quest) ranks each category on its own, and an account can hold a best run in both.
• A bot declares itself with the replay's pilot field. The declaration is opt-in, and the board shows it as the operator's claim.
• Moderators mark accounts as bots. A single run can be moved either way when the account mark doesn't fit it.
• Signals are shown to moderators and never hide a run. A flagged run stays where it is until a moderator moves it.
• The seed stays the client's. The game is chaotic enough that a known seed doesn't help a human, and a bot can search its opening inputs instead of seeds, so a seed issued by the server would stop neither. A scripted bot test (2026-10-09) showed this: the Plasma Shotgun is the first weapon drop on 3.4% of seeds. Replaying a lucky seed with exactly the same inputs gives it every time, and with 1 px of aim noise 72% of the time. With human imprecision (20 px of aim noise, or starting 10 ticks late) it falls back to 2–6%. On one fixed seed, 69 of 1000 slightly different openings gave it.
• There is no official bot harness yet. The Python port is open and scriptable, and a model can write a harness for it on its own.

The category of a run¶

The service works a run's category out when it shows it, so a later moderator action applies to old runs too:

1. a moderator's choice for that run, if there is one;
2. otherwise bot when the replay declares a pilot or the account is marked as a bot;
3. otherwise human.

Ranks, the "best run" of a player and the in-game Update scores all count within a category. The game's high score screen shows the human board.

The pilot¶

A replay may carry pilot, the program that played it: the bot's name, and optionally the model or tool behind it and a page about it (replay format). Verification ignores it, the same as the recorder. The upload signs the whole payload, so only the key's owner can add or change it. The bot board and the run page show the pilot next to the operator's account.

The perk menu¶

The perk screen pauses the game, so a stock client can't play on while the menu is open or pick a perk without opening it. The verifiers hold every category to this (perk commands); a refused command refuses the whole run.

Signals¶

The verifier measures each run's inputs while it replays them, over the ticks where player one is alive:

A signal above its threshold flags the run. The thresholds, and what Astra's and human runs measured against them, are in service/src/signals.ts (SIGNAL_FLAGS).

The aim point is the world point the aim scheme reaches. That is the mouse point, the player's position plus the pad's reach, or the cursor through the camera under relative mouse aim. Keyboard and joystick aim have none. overlapping_runs, on the account, counts runs accepted sooner after the account's previous run than the run's own game time. Uploads queued offline arrive together, so it's a hint for moderators, not a flag.

Every input check is easy to beat on purpose: noise, smoothing or human-like timing defeat each one. Signals catch bots that don't try to hide, and they tell moderators where to look.

Roles and moderation¶

Accounts have a role: none, mod or admin. Account 1 is the admin. The admin grants and removes the mod role. Both roles can:

• see each run's signals and the flagged runs list (/mod);
• mark or unmark an account as a bot;
• set or clear a run's category.

Each action takes a note and goes to the moderation log, which moderators can read. Joining accounts keeps the bot mark if either account had it and the stronger of their roles, so a join never moves a bot's runs to the human boards or loses a moderator. The admin's account cannot be deleted from the site. The existing actions (hide a run, hide a name, ban a key or an account) stay as they are.

The site's moderation API, for signed-in moderators only:

Run pages show moderators the run's signals, how its category was decided and the controls to change it. Profiles show them the account's mark and overlapping_runs.