Getting Started

Setup

The easiest way to start using the bot is to install it on a computer which already has WarCraft 3: The Frozen Throne installed. Once the bot is installed and started, you should see a form with many settings. Start by going to the “profile:default” tab to enter the cd keys, username and password the bot will use when connecting to bnet. Now go back to the ‘global’ tab, and review the settings there. You can (probably) leave them all alone, except for the BNLS server setting. Go to the Warden page for how to setup that setting.

Hosting your First Game

You control the bot by typing commands into the yellow text box (command box) and hitting enter. The most important command is help, which leads you to all the other commands as well as how to use them. For example, help will state that entering help * (help star) will give a list of available commands and entering help command will give help on a specific command. Note that you do not need to use a command prefix (eg. !help instead of help) when entering commands into the command box.

Now we can try hosting a game. Enter connect default into the command box to tell Tinker to create a battle net client and connect it using the settings from the default profile. Once the command finishes, you should see a new tab up top called “Client:Default” (go to it). This tab also has a command box, but it issues commands to the bnet client instead of the main bot. Once again, you can use help to explore the available commands. The one we are interested in is called host. Enter the command host name= map=twistedmeadows -private to tell Tinker to host a game. The bot should host a private game called “my test game” for the 4-player melee map twisted meadows. Notice that you do not have to enter the full filename to match the twisted meadows map, because the bot expects a map query instead of a filename.

Joining your First Game

If you happened to have a second set of cd keys for the bot, you can join the game normally (connect wc3 to bnet, custom games list, enter game name, bla bla bla). However, in the case that you are using your wc3 cd keys for the bot, you will not be able to have wc3 and the bot on bnet at the same time. In order to join the game you will need to advertise it on lan.

Luckily, the bot makes this quite easy. Go to the main bot tab (before or after the game is hosted; it doesn’t matter), and enter the command CreateLan some_name -auto. This instructs Tinker to create a lan advertiser which automatically advertises any games hosted by the bot. Note that, by default, the games are only advertised to the computer running the bot. To advertise to a different computer you add -receiver=other_computer to the command (where other_computer is the other computer’s host name or ip address). You can also use -receiver=255.255.255.255 to broadcast to all computers on the local network.

Once the advertiser is running and the bot is hosting the game, you can start WC3 and click on the ‘Local Area Network’ button to see and join the game.