Warrior Encyclopedia
The classic Core War strategies, rebuilt for ZoreWars and explained line by line, plus the new warriors written for ZoreWars' plane and 3D battlefields. Every one is in the arena's warrior picker and in the warriors/ folder.
How many warriors exist?
Thousands. Core War has been played since 1984, and players have published their programs to newsgroups, tournament archives and "hills" (standing tournaments) ever since. The two big public archives:
Koenigstuhl
Planar's archive
Almost all of them belong to a handful of strategy families. This page covers those families with working examples, and the new warriors written for ZoreWars' plane and 3D battlefields.
About the code on this page. The archives don't say whether their warriors may be redistributed, so the warriors here are written for ZoreWars: our own implementations of classic ideas, with a link to the original that inspired each one, and new designs for the plane and 3D battlefields. The exceptions are three tiny classics that every Core War introduction reproduces: Imp and Dwarf (A. K. Dewdney, Scientific American, 1984) and Mice (Chip Wendell, 1986), credited to their authors and kept out of our CC0 dedication (see warriors/LICENSE.md). You can still battle the originals: Fight in the Hall of Fame (or Import… in the arena, or zorewars battle classic:thermite) fetches a warrior from its archive when you use it, and it stays in your browser. All 35 originals below load and run, including FOR loops and P-space. 34 run on the classic rules. Frontwards was written for the 94x hill (55,440 cells, P-space) and is 201 instructions long, one over that hill's limit (pMARS refuses it too), so its Fight switches to the 94x hill rules with room for 201.
Counts checked on 24 October 2026. Koenigstuhl was last updated 23 July 2026.
Library ranking
Every warrior on this page against every other, 100 rounds per pairing. Like rock-paper-scissors, the order depends on who's in the field: add your own warrior and the table changes.
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Hall of fame
Famous warriors from forty years of Core War. Links go to the original source in the public archives; "our version" links to the warrior on this page built on the same idea.
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The most recent name is worth noticing. Arvon, credited to "Stefan Kammann & Forge-AI", topped the Koenigstuhl 94nop recursive ranking in 2026. Its strategy notes describe a quickscan whose parameters came from a data-driven coverage model, followed by a silk paper and a stone. AI-assisted warriors are already competing at the top: exactly the kind of loop the ZoreWars CLI is built for.
The warriors
Each card explains the idea, walks through the code line by line (the explanations are the comments in the source file), and shows real results from the benchmark. Watch it fight opens the warrior in the arena against a suitable opponent. Plane and 3D warriors fight on their own battlefields (experimental), so their matchups aren't in the ring benchmark.
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