Launching 10 November 2026
Out now · Free for your copy of TA
Total AnnihilationReborn
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.
- Rust + wgpu
- Formations
- 20,000 units
- Ray tracing
- 14 languages
- Mods from ModDB
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, and never changes it.
Get it on GOGFree and open source
Free software under the GNU GPL v3. Every line of the engine is new, written in Rust: twelve 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.
The battlefield, reborn
Worlds · Water · Fire · Twenty thousand units
TA's worlds, lit as they never were. Each has a sky and a light of its own, hills cast long shadows, surf breaks along the shores and ships leave wakes.
Fire burns through orange to white instead of glaring, rain soaks the ground and stands in puddles that mirror the sky, and close to the ground TA's painted trees, rocks, ruins and props give way to 3D models of TA Reborn's own. Seen from TA's usual height, the battle keeps the art exactly as it was painted.
Two art styles
Reborn rebuilds every unit and building as the game loads, mods' too: armour plates with seams and bolts on their faces, road wheels inside their tracks, and TA's paint redrawn four times as fine, its baked-in light evened out.
Enhanced Classic keeps TA's own models and paint, with smooth curves and edges that catch the light.
- Water: whitecaps on the crests, shallows graded by depth with caustics on the bed, ships and hovercraft leaving bow waves and wakes; acid looks like acid.
- Light and shadow: the relief casts long shadows, soft shadows harden at the contact and wrecks come down glowing; ray-traced shadows, ambient occlusion and reflections on cards that trace rays.
- Battles with weight: vehicles squat, dip and lean on their suspension, walkers walk, aircraft fall trailing smoke, ships list and go under, and buildings rise out of a glowing nano-lattice.
- The ground up close: sand, soil, turf, rock, snow, ice, volcanic rock, metal and lunar dust, told from TA's painted colours; steep faces are walls of the world's own rock.
- Battle highlights: after a battle, its decisive moments replayed with a circling camera, cinema bars and slow motion.
- Past the edge: beyond the map, the ground runs on as the map's own mirror image.
Perspective
Ride along in any unit and see the battle from its cockpit
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.
- Live instruments on their screens: what the unit is doing, each weapon's state and reload, a radar scope, the hull in segments; 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. The view is yours alone, so it changes nothing for the other players.
Command and control
Formations · Two cameras · A modern HUD, or TA's own
A modern 3D camera that turns and tilts over the battle, or TA's own top-down view as it was in 1997. A modern interface, or TA's. Every one of TA's controls, and the ones it never had.
- Armies move as armies: a group sent somewhere takes a formation, the short-ranged in front and the artillery, builders and Commanders behind, marching side by side at the pace of its slowest unit. The movement rule "As in TA" keeps the old way.
- TA's controls, all of them: Ctrl+click force fire, the Ctrl+letter selections, TA's order keys, F1 on a unit for everything TA told about it, and the chat commands.
- And modern ones: area orders, formation lines drawn with Ctrl+drag, factory routes, control groups, camera bookmarks, idle alerts, and units that give way to each other in traffic.
Ways to play
Skirmish · Campaigns · Conquest · Scenarios · Multiplayer
- Skirmish
- Up to ten players, 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
- Conquest
- A galaxy of TA's worlds; veterans and your Commander's experience carry from battle to battle
- Scenarios
- Last Stand, King of the Hill, Extraction, Decapitation, Doomsday Clock, Metal Rush, Armageddon, Endless Siege; your own as TOML files
- Multiplayer
- Lockstep over a local network or the internet: lobby, spectators, chat, rejoining, an ally taking over a lost player's army
- Replays
- Every game recorded; seek backwards and forwards, cast it like a tournament, watch its highlights, export it as a video
- Tutorial
- Three short lessons, and tips on the loading screen
Computer players
They build, raid, nuke and talk back
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. Each has a name and a manner: Arm officers correct, Core intelligences cold, mercenaries loud. They greet you, taunt you all battle long, answer what you ask on the chat line ("where are you?", "how are you doing?"), gloat and grumble as the battle turns, and cry foul when you cheat.
Cheats work in single player too: TA's codes (+atm, +nowisee, +radar…) and new ones (+god, +instant, +spawn peewee 10 enemy), with a panel that places any unit anywhere.
The Archives
TA's heritage, honoured
- 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 in one click · A map editor · Data tools
The launcher's mod library brings community conversions from ModDB and their creators in one click: Total Mayhem, TA: Escalation, Talon, Total Battletech and The Final Frontier, among others. Each card describes the tested compatibility.
- 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.
- Every mod is checked 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 shapes the ground, paints, places features and starts, takes your pictures as heights, art or tile brushes, and saves maps as mods the skirmish page lists at once.
- Twenty-eight maps of TA Reborn's own: forests, deserts, islands, worlds of fire and of metal, rocks adrift in space, winter villages lit for Christmas, and Australia, the United States and the whole world.
And more
Everything around the battle
A career
XP for everything done in battle, twenty-one ranks from Recruit to Commander, each with its insignia, and 134 achievements in six categories and four tiers.
Skins
Twelve liveries laid over every unit, from Heritage's battle-worn TA to winter, tiger and parade dress, and an editor to paint your own and share it.
Cast and video
Watch a replay as a tournament's broadcast, its camera directing itself, and export it as an MP4 up to 4K at 60 pictures a second.
Companion screen
A second display holds the battle's map at full size beside your economy, forces, factories and the battle's events.
Photo mode
The battle holds still: tilt-shift, lens focus and the time of day, saved up to 4K.
Benchmark
Three minutes of staged battles score your graphics card, processor and memory and pick the settings that hold 60 frames a second.
Commanders
Several profiles on one computer, each with its own settings, saved battles, campaign unlocks, Conquest and career.
Accessibility
Rebindable keys, either mouse button for orders, gamepads, colour-blind colours and more, in the launcher and the game.
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 run in a virtual machine inside it, the computer players give the same orders a player does, and it is 64-bit throughout, with room to grow for mods.
Get started
Your copy of TA, one download, and you're in
- 1
Own Total Annihilation
The Commander Pack on GOG.com, with The Core Contingency and Battle Tactics, is the reference; Steam installs and other copies work too.
- 2
Download TA Reborn
Choose x64 or ARM64 for your device: an installer or portable ZIP on Windows, an app on macOS, DEB, Arch or portable packages on Linux.
- 3
Start the launcher
It finds GOG and Steam installs by itself (otherwise point it at the game's folder), checks what is there and sets the graphics up for your computer. Create your commander, choose ARM or CORE, and deploy.
- 4
Run the benchmark
If you like: about three minutes of staged battles, up to 3,500 units at once, then the settings that hold 60 frames a second.
System requirements
What it runs on
| Part | Needs | For the most of it |
|---|---|---|
| Systems | Windows 10+ x64 or Windows 11 ARM64; macOS 13+ on Intel or Apple Silicon; Ubuntu 22.04+ or 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 |
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.
The Total Annihilation: Commander Pack on GOG.com, with The Core Contingency and Battle Tactics, is the reference. Steam installs and other copies work too.
How much does it cost?
Nothing. TA Reborn is free and open source, under the GNU General Public License v3. 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 is TA's own; everything around them is new. 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 top-down camera (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 brings community conversions from ModDB in one click, among them Total Mayhem, TA: Escalation, Talon, Total Battletech and The Final Frontier. 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.
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.