Swarm is a 2D programming and resource gathering game. Program your robots to explore the world and collect resources, which in turn allows you to build upgraded robots that can run more interesting and complex programs. More info can be found on the Swarm website.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for information about various ways you can contribute to Swarm development!

If you just want to play the game, head over to the Swarm website for installation instructions. If you want to build Swarm from source (e.g. in order to contribute, or to test out the latest bleeding-edge unreleased features), read on.

1. Clone the Swarm repository, e.g.

   git clone https://github.com/swarm-game/swarm.git
   

2. If you don't already have the cabal tool:

   1. Get the ghcup tool, a handy one-stop utility for managing all the different pieces of a Haskell toolchain.

   2. Use ghcup to install a supported version of GHC:

      ghcup install ghc 9.8.2
      

   3. Use ghcup to install cabal:

      ghcup install cabal
      

3. Now use cabal to build and run Swarm:

   cd /path/to/the/swarm/repo
   cabal run -O0 swarm:exe:swarm
   

   (Note that we recommend turning off optimizations with -O0 since they don't seem to make much difference to the speed of the resulting executable, but they make a big difference in compilation time.)

4. Go get a snack while cabal downloads and builds all of Swarm's dependencies.

5. You might also want to check out the scripts directory, which contains an assortment of useful scripts for developers.