Help train the world's strongest Catan engine.
Atlas learns by playing itself, millions of games over. Every game your computer plays makes the engine measurably stronger — and credits your machine on the live workers page.
Why this matters
The best published Catan AI today (HexMachina, 2025) reaches 54% vs a strong alpha-beta baseline. Atlas's goal is to surpass that, in the open, with contributor compute. No company. No paywall.
What your PC does
Plays Catan against itself as fast as one CPU core allows (typically 2–4 games/sec). Each finished game is uploaded as a ~7 KB record. No GPU needed.
Footprint
One CPU core per worker process. ~50 MB RAM. ~100 KB/sec network upstream at peak. You can run multiple workers if you want to dedicate more cores, or just one to barely notice.
Install in under a minute
Choose your OS and how many workers to run. The install snippet updates automatically.
Will appear as your-computer-name-1 through your-computer-name-2 on the live workers page. Leave blank to use your computer’s hostname.
Each worker uses one CPU thread. The default leaves one thread free for your OS.
Each worker opens in its own PowerShell window — you can see logs and close any one to stop it.
Open PowerShell
Search 'PowerShell' in the Start menu. No admin needed.
Paste this and hit enter — starts all 2 workers (Windows · PowerShell)
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force -Path .\atlas-worker | Out-Null
cd .\atlas-worker
Invoke-WebRequest "https://downloads.landover.io/start-worker.ps1?t=$([int64](Get-Date -UFormat %s))" -OutFile start-worker.ps1
1..2 | ForEach-Object {
$i = $_
Start-Process powershell.exe -ArgumentList @(
"-NoExit","-ExecutionPolicy","Bypass","-Command",
"`$env:ATLAS_WORKER_DIR='$PWD\worker-' + $i; `$env:ATLAS_WORKER_NODE_ID='$env:COMPUTERNAME-' + $i; .\start-worker.ps1"
)
}
Write-Host "✓ Opened 2 worker windows. Close any window to stop that one."That's it!
You should see ⠋ Playing games: N tick up. Your contributions appear on the live workers page within seconds.
FAQ
Is it safe? What does the binary actually do?▼
atlas-engine.landover.io. It doesn't read your files, doesn't take any input from your machine, and only makes outbound HTTPS calls to the Atlas API.Will it slow down my computer?▼
How much data does it upload?▼
Can I stop it?▼
Get-Process atlas-worker | Stop-Process (Windows) or pkill -f start-worker.sh; pkill -x atlas-worker (Mac/Linux). Any in-flight batch is flushed before exit.What's the deal with `apiKey`?▼
How do I know my contributions are actually helping?▼
nodeId (default: your hostname). The live counter on the main page shows total active workers globally; a per-node breakdown is coming soon. Behind the scenes, every game you play adds to the training dataset for the next model version.