Launching 10 November 2026
Out now · Free for your copy of TA
Total Annihilation Reborn
The 1997 classic, rebuilt from scratch in Rust: a clean-room engine that plays your own copy of Total Annihilation on modern hardware.
Release day: the downloads open any moment now.
- Ray tracing
- 20,000 units
- A cockpit in every unit
- 28 maps of its own
- Mods from ModDB
- 14 languages
Your copy of TA
TA Reborn contains no original game data: no units, maps, art, sound, music or video. It reads them in place from your own install of Total Annihilation, GOG's, Steam's or another, and never changes it.
Free and open source
Free software under the GNU GPL v3 or later. Every line of the engine is new, written in Rust: sixteen crates around a deterministic 30 Hz simulation and a wgpu renderer.
The source code is published with the release.
Windows, macOS and Linux
Native builds for x64 and ARM64: an installer or portable ZIP on Windows, an app on macOS, and DEB, Arch and portable packages on Linux.
System requirementsTA Reborn is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by the owners of Total Annihilation.
Features
Everything at a glance
- The battlefield Every world its own sky and light · ray-traced shadows and reflections · surf, wakes and caustics · lava, rain and moonlit nights · 20,000 units in one battle · two art styles · twelve skins and an editor
- Construction Nano-lathe beams and build lattices · buildings rising out of the green and sagging into rubble · factories that roll their units out · reclaim, wrecks and heaps
- Perspective Ride along in any unit · eight modelled cockpits · live instruments · rain on the glass
- Command and control The command deck, or TA's own 1997 panel · formations that march as armies · strategic zoom · a companion screen · photo mode · all of TA's keys · gamepads
- Ways to play Skirmish for ten · every campaign of your install · Conquest · eight scenarios · lockstep multiplayer · replays with a cast view and MP4 export
- Computer players They build, raid, nuke and fight at sea · personas with names and manners · transmissions in battle · rivals who remember you
- The launcher Finds GOG and Steam copies · mods from ModDB in a click · a map library · commander profiles, 21 ranks and 134 achievements · a benchmark
- TA Reborn's worlds 28 maps of its own · forests, deserts, islands, fire, metal, space and winter villages · Australia, the USA and the whole world
- The Archives Every unit on show, wallpapers to 8K · the intro's 1997 bedroom · the Galactic War · a title screen that films the worlds · a jukebox
The battlefield
Worlds · Water · Fire · Weather
TA's worlds, lit as they never were. Each has a sky and a light of its own; hills cast long shadows and steep faces stand as walls of rock; surf breaks along the shores and ships leave wakes.
Fire burns through orange to white; rain soaks the ground and stands in puddles that mirror the sky; and past the map's edge the world runs on to the horizon. Seen from TA's usual height, the battle keeps the art exactly as it was painted.
- A modern renderer for TA's art: physically based lighting, soft shadows that harden at the contact, ambient occlusion, HD surfaces that wear paint, soot and embers, and the ground's own materials (sand, soil, turf, rock, snow, ice, volcanic rock, metal, lunar dust) told from TA's painted colours. On cards that trace rays: ray-traced shadows, occlusion and reflections.
- Worlds of their own: smoke over lava, smog over metal and cities, violet over crystal, a black, starry sky on the moon. Beyond the map's edge the world runs on: the map's own ground across the edge, then land and sea like the map's round that stretch of it (a metal world's city of plating, the moon's craters), never copies of it.
- Water: surf and whitecaps, shallows graded by depth with caustics on the bed, bow waves and wakes behind ships and hovercraft, hulls and wading legs seen through the water. Lava crusts and glows; acid looks like acid.
- Time and weather: dawn, dusk, a moonlit night (bases light up, aircraft blink their beacons) or a full day and night; showers that soak the ground and dry.
- Battles with weight: vehicles squat, dip and lean on their suspension; guns kick their units back and big blasts shove the units round them; walkers walk in step with the ground; aircraft fall trailing smoke; ships list and go under; shells landing in the sea throw up spray.
- 3D close to the ground: TA's painted trees, rocks, crystals, ruins, pipework and relays stand as models of TA Reborn's own when the camera comes down to them.
Two art styles
Reborn rebuilds TA's designs in detail as the game loads, mods' too: armour plates, bolts and road wheels, domes, barrels and rounded hulls cut into finer facets, and its metal repainted crisp and clean, four times as fine.
Enhanced Classic keeps TA's own models and paint.
Skins: twelve built in, Reborn's own finish and eleven liveries laid over every unit's own detail (Heritage's battle-worn TA as it was, desert, winter, woodland, navy, urban, tiger and night camouflage, Christmas, Halloween and parade dress), for your army, the enemy or both, and an editor to make your own.
Construction
The nano-lathe at work
Everything is built the way TA built it: a constructor plays its nano-lathe on the ground, a green lattice of the building rises out of the beams and fills in, and the finished building unfolds.
Here the beams are streams of light that arc and splash, the lattice glows and shimmers as it fills, wrecks are reclaimed into metal, and a destroyed building sags into its rubble.
A morning in a few seconds: a base rising on Highland Rift, eight times as fast.
Perspective
Ride along in any unit
Select a unit and press Q: the camera dives into it, onto a tank's turret, into a walker's head, onto a ship's bridge, up a submarine's periscope or into a fighter's canopy, and you ride along while it goes on with its orders.
The mouse looks round, the wheel magnifies the sight, and Escape climbs back out.
- Eight modelled cockpits, made in Blender for TA Reborn: a tank's vision port, a kbot's visor, the Krogoth's heavy cab, the Commander's helmet, a ship's bridge, a fighter's canopy, a gunship's glass, a gun house's slit in concrete. Glass in every window: dust that catches the sun, and in the rain, drops that cling and run down it.
- Live instruments: what the unit is doing, each weapon's state and reload, a radar scope, the hull in segments, the Commander's economy; aircraft get a flight display with the horizon's ladder.
- Yours, an ally's, or anyone's: ride along with an ally's unit, or any unit in a replay or as a spectator. You hear the battle from inside the hull, the glass cracks as it wears, the cabin lamp stutters as the hull fails, and a unit lost takes its signal with it.
Command and control
Formations · Two interfaces
The command deck: the minimap, the selection and its orders on three steel plates along the foot of the screen, and the battlefield between and above them. Or TA's own 1997 interface, as it was.
The selection's card says what it is doing; beside it stand a mixed selection's kinds and the switches that narrow it, a factory's or a constructor's queue, or one kind's key figures. The orders keep their keys, the standing orders show their setting with lamps, and the build menu spreads out as wide as it needs. Units are pictured by portraits drawn from their own models in their owner's colours.
- Armies move as armies: a group order lays its units out in a formation; they march at the pace of the slowest and arrive in shape, facing the way they went. The movement rule "As in TA" keeps the old way.
- TA's controls, all of them: force fire (Ctrl+right-click), the Ctrl+letter selections, TA's order keys, F1 on a unit for everything TA told about it, factories that feed their squads, the chat commands.
- And modern ones: area orders, formation lines drawn with Ctrl+right-drag, factory routes, control groups with a bar of their own, camera bookmarks, idle alerts, a battle history (Alt+H), units that give way to each other in traffic.
- Two cameras: a modern 3D camera that turns and tilts, or TA's own oblique view (F5).
- The companion screen (Alt+C) puts the battle's map at full size on a second display beside the economy, your forces, your factories and the battle's events; a click there looks or orders, and it never takes the keyboard from the battle.
- For everyone: rebindable keys, left- or right-button orders, gamepads (the Steam Deck's too), colour-blind colours, interface scaling and reduced motion.
Ways to play
Skirmish · Campaigns · Conquest · More
- Skirmish
- Up to ten players in teams, computer players at three levels, starting rules, TA's line of sight choices
- Campaigns
- Every campaign of your install (Arm and Core, The Core Contingency's, Battle Tactics'), with TA's own mission scripts and briefings
- Conquest
- A galaxy of TA's worlds taken system by system: rewards for every system held, counter-attacks to beat off, veterans carried from battle to battle, and a Commander who earns perks at each promotion
- Scenarios
- Last Stand, King of the Hill, Extraction, Decapitation, Doomsday Clock, Metal Rush, Armageddon and Endless Siege, on three difficulties; your own as TOML files
- Multiplayer
- Lockstep over a local network or the internet: a lobby, spectators, chat, rejoining, an ally taking over a lost player's army
- Replays
- Every game recorded: seek backwards and forwards, rewind, watch it as a cast, see its highlights, or export it as an MP4 (720p to 4K, 30 or 60 a second, the director's camera or a cinematic one, with the battle's sounds and music)
- Tutorial
- Three short lessons, and field notes on the loading screen
After a battle, its highlights replay its decisive moments with a circling camera and slow motion; WATCH HIGHLIGHTS is a click away on the result page.
Computer players
Names, manners and grudges
The computer players run their economies and tech, build defences, raid, send attack waves, air strikes and nukes, fight at sea and ferry armies across the water. Hard pulls hurt units back for repairs, concentrates its fire and fights island wars from the air.
They also talk, in person. Each enemy is a persona with a name and a title (an Arm field commander, a Core machine intelligence, a mercenary), and their lines come in as transmissions: their Commander on a little screen, static as the link is made, the words typed out as they speak.
They greet you, taunt you, answer what you ask on the chat line, gloat and grumble as the battle turns, mourn their experimentals, make a last stand when their factories fall, and remember you: an enemy Commander you have fought before may come back, and greets you by who won last time.
Cheats work in single player: TA's codes (+atm, +nowisee, +radar…)
and new ones (+god, +instant, +spawn peewee 10 enemy), with a panel
that places any unit anywhere. A cheat costs the battle its career: its XP, records and achievements are
taken back.
The launcher
Mods · Maps · Skins · Your career
The launcher finds your GOG or Steam copy by itself (or point it at the game's folder), checks what is there, sets the graphics up for your computer, and keeps TA Reborn up to date.
Quick starts for skirmish, campaign, tutorial and the map editor; your recent saves and replays; TA's calmer music playing quietly; seasonal dress at Halloween, Christmas and the New Year; keyboard help on F1 and search on Ctrl+F.
- Mods: the catalogue's community conversions (Total Mayhem, TA: Escalation, Talon, Total Battletech, The Final Frontier and more) and your installed mods in one library: search, filter, install in a click (or, for a mod hosted on its own website, with Have the file?), update all; see what each mod changes; drag the load order into place.
- Maps: cards with each map's own terrain, filters by players, size, world and source, favourites, a random pick; details with the numbered start positions, PLAY, SET UP SKIRMISH and EDIT A COPY; map archives imported in a click.
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Skins: every skin on your units, for your army or the enemy; make your own in the editor (a pattern from
tiles in your colours, palettes, finish and weathering, pictures of your own on the armour, all live, with
undo) and share
.taskinpacks. - Commander profiles: several people on one device, each with their own settings, saves, campaign progress and career. Playing earns XP for time, kills, units and buildings, captures, economy and results; twenty-one ranks from Recruit to Commander, each with its insignia, and service stars past level 100.
- Achievements: 134 in six categories and four tiers, each with its own medallion, a notice when earned and a picture of the moment kept for its page.
- Benchmark: eight scenes on eight of TA Reborn's worlds in about five minutes, from fleets trading broadsides at dawn and a ride in a Stumpy's cockpit to twenty thousand units and fireworks at midnight (QUICK RUN takes a minute and a half). Scores for your graphics card, processor and memory against an RTX 4080 with a Ryzen 9 5950X (10,000 each), what each effect costs, and the settings that hold 60 frames a second.
TA Reborn's worlds
Twenty-eight maps of its own
Twenty-eight maps of TA Reborn's own, grown by its map generator and shipped with the game.
The duels and team maps are point-symmetric, each half the other turned round the middle; every base has level ground to build on and its metal close by; and on land maps a tank can drive from every base to every other. The real places are as they are, their bases at their cities.
- Forests
- Mossvale, Timberline, Greenmantle, and Highland Rift's river canyon
- Deserts
- Sunscar Dunes, Redstone Mesas, Mirage Basin
- Islands
- Twin Reefs, Crescent Keys, Stormbreak Archipelago, Sapphire Reach
- Fire
- Embergate, Furnace Caldera, Obsidian Wastes, Cinder Basin's molten rivers
- Metal
- Foundry Deck, Reactor Grid, Hammerfall Works: decks of plating over coolant canals
- Space
- Rift Belt, Lagrange Station, Starfall Expanse: rocks adrift over a planet, joined by gantries
- Winter
- Frostfall Hollow, Hollyridge, Midnight Square, First Light Peaks: villages lit by night, fireworks at New Year
- Real places
- Australia, the United States and the whole world, their coasts and lakes from Natural Earth
The Archives
TA's heritage, honoured
- The encyclopaedia lists every unit by side and kind, in its side's colours, beside everything TA's F1 page tells and the build chain that makes it; WALLPAPER saves the very picture you frame.
- The intro's room is a modelled bedroom lit by the moon through the blinds: the movie on the tube, a lava lamp, a turbo display reading 166, the calendar open at September 1997.
- The title screen is a film of short scenes staged live on TA Reborn's worlds, each with its own light, weather and camera; leave it a while (or press WATCH) and the menu steps aside for it.
- A jukebox for TA's soundtrack by its parts and your own music beside it; TA's own interface sounds; the credits roll Cavedog's teams, read from your install.
- Fourteen languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
Mods and making
ModDB · A map editor · Skins
The launcher's mod library installs community conversions from ModDB in one click, Total Mayhem, Talon and Total Battletech among them. TA: Escalation and The Final Frontier come from their own websites: Have the file? checks the download and installs it.
- Mods need no code: they load from folders or TA's own archives, later ones over earlier ones, and the rules and the computer players read unit properties. Mods made for patched original engines can load their own sides.
- Every mod is checked for its files, references, sounds and packaging, in the background against the game without it, so what it breaks counts and what was broken before does not; a readable report says where and how to fix it.
- The map editor works on new maps or copies of existing ones: tools by name, the map in miniature, a check for problems and TEST PLAY; it takes your pictures as heights, art or tile brushes, and saves maps as mods the skirmish page lists at once.
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ta-toolsinspects, converts and validates TA's data files, and grows TA Reborn's maps.
Under the hood
A new engine for a 1997 classic
The simulation runs at TA's 30 ticks a second in fixed-point arithmetic, with table trigonometry and its own random numbers, so every computer playing a game computes the same battle.
That is what lockstep multiplayer, replays and rewinding stand on. TA's own unit scripts (COB) run in a virtual machine inside it, and the computer players give the same orders a player does. It is 64-bit throughout, with room to grow for mods: 256 unit categories, and build times exact however long.
- ta_formats
- TA's file formats: HPI archives, GAF, 3DO, COB, TNT, TDF, PCX…
- ta_vfs
- Finds the install (GOG, Steam or a folder), mounts the archives, TA Reborn's maps and the mods as one file system
- ta_data, ta_sim
- Game data, and the deterministic 30 Hz simulation with the COB script VM
- ta_ai
- The computer players
- ta_render, ta_audio, ta_video
- The wgpu renderer with ray tracing, sound and music, TA's movies
- ta_net, ta_config, ta_ui, ta_skins, ta_mp4
- Lockstep multiplayer, settings and careers, the shared interface, unit skins, video export
- ta_game, ta_launcher, ta_tools
- The game, the launcher, the data tools and map generator
Get started
Your copy of TA and one installer
- 1
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2
Download TA Reborn
x64 or ARM64. Windows has an installer and a portable ZIP; macOS an app ZIP and a disk image; Linux an Ubuntu DEB, Arch and Arch Linux ARM packages, and portable ones.
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3
Start TA Reborn
The launcher finds GOG and Steam installs by itself, checks what is there and sets the graphics up for your computer. Create your commander profile (a name, a picture and an allegiance) and press PLAY.
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4
Run the benchmark
If you like: the BENCHMARK page finds the settings that suit your computer in about five minutes, or a minute and a half with QUICK RUN.
System requirements
What it runs on
| Part | Needs | Best with |
|---|---|---|
| Systems | Windows 10+ x64 or Windows 11 ARM64; macOS 13+ on Intel or Apple Silicon; Ubuntu 22.04+ on x64 or ARM64; Arch Linux on x64, Arch Linux ARM on ARM64 | A second display for the companion screen |
| Graphics | DirectX 12 or Vulkan on Windows, Vulkan on Linux, Metal on macOS; integrated graphics on Low | 6 GB of video memory for High, 10 GB for Ultra; a card that traces rays for ray tracing |
| The game | Total Annihilation, legitimately owned | The Commander Pack, with both expansions, from GOG.com or Steam |
Questions
Frequently asked
Do I need the original Total Annihilation?
Yes. TA Reborn contains no original game data: no units, maps, art, sound, music or video. It plays the data of your own copy, read in place from its install folder, and never changes it.
Total Annihilation: Commander Pack, with The Core Contingency and Battle Tactics, from GOG.com or Steam: both ship the same data files, and the launcher finds either by itself. Other copies work too.
How much does it cost?
Nothing. TA Reborn is free and open source, under the GNU General Public License v3 or later. All you need is your own copy of Total Annihilation.
Is it official?
No. TA Reborn is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by the owners of Total Annihilation. It is a clean-room reimplementation: a new engine, written from scratch in Rust on the community's decades of research into TA's file formats, without the original game's code.
Which computers does it run on?
Windows 10 and 11 on x64, and Windows 11 on ARM64; macOS 13 or later on Intel and Apple Silicon; and Ubuntu 22.04 or later and Arch Linux on x64 and ARM64 (Arch Linux ARM).
Windows has an installer and a portable ZIP, macOS an app ZIP and a disk image, and Linux DEB, Arch and portable packages.
I have never played Total Annihilation. Where do I start?
With the primer on this site: the Arm and the Core, your Commander, metal and energy, factories and orders. In the game, the tutorial teaches the same in three short guided games on Painted Desert; then play a skirmish against an Easy computer player, then Normal.
Does it still play like TA?
Every unit, map, campaign and sound of TA's comes from your install; everything around them is new, 28 maps of TA Reborn's own among them. The simulation runs at TA's 30 ticks a second and TA's own unit scripts drive the units.
You can keep TA's 1997 interface and its oblique view (F5), all of TA's controls and chat commands, and its way of moving: the movement rule "As in TA" turns formations off.
Do mods work?
Yes, and they need no code. The launcher's mod library installs community conversions from ModDB in one click, Total Mayhem, Talon and Total Battletech among them; TA: Escalation and The Final Frontier come from their own websites, and Have the file? checks the download and installs it. Mods load from folders or TA's own archives, later ones over earlier ones.
Every mod is checked in the background against the game without it, with a readable report of anything it breaks. The map editor saves its maps as mods that the skirmish page lists at once.
Credits
Who made it
A fan project, free software under the GNU GPL v3 or later. Thanks to the Total Annihilation community, whose decades of file-format research made it possible, and everyone who has kept Total Annihilation alive since 1997.
- Project lead
- Jared Woodruff
- Programming, art and translations
- Jared Woodruff, with the AI coders Claude Code Opus 5.5 (Max) by Anthropic and GPT6 ASTRA (Ultra) by OpenAI
- Built with
- Rust, wgpu, winit, egui and eframe, symphonia, cpal, glam, rayon, serde and other libraries; the original art made with Blender and Python; the installer with NSIS
- Map data
- Coastlines and lakes from Natural Earth
- Total Annihilation
- Cavedog Entertainment, 1997. The game's credits roll its teams, read from your install
The war never ended
TA Reborn launches on 10 November 2026. Have your copy of Total Annihilation ready.
TA Reborn is out now, free for the copy of Total Annihilation you already own.
Release day: the downloads open any moment now.