FEnigma/README.md

FEnigma

Fe (iron) + Enigma

A companion app that mostly automates IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator for you. Select the game's typewriter orders (selecting text in-game copies it to your clipboard automatically) and it solves the geo puzzle and the trajectory math, handing you ready-to-fire commands: elevation, azimuth, number of powder charges. Screenshotting works the same way when a selection isn't practical. Select or screenshot the field log the same way and it picks up kills and newly-spotted units automatically. Screenshot the map table and it reads the grid straight off the photo, lays the shot onto its own map, and offers up the enemy markers it spotted. You can also plan strikes and scout flights of your own. Pure screen-reading, no game files touched, no input injected.

What it does

• Reads orders, solves the geometry. Copy (or screenshot) the in-game typewriter text and it parses absolute grid refs and relative bearing/distance descriptions, then resolves everything into map coordinates, chained clues ("Bearing 293 from Alpha") included. The map shows its work: the actual bearing lines/circles behind each resolved position. When a description is genuinely ambiguous (two intersections), both candidates are shown instead of guessing.
• Reads the map table itself. Screenshot the map and it recovers the grid geometry from the cell labels printed on the table: the perspective, the scale, and which cells you are actually looking at. The screenshot is then rectified onto the app's own map, lined up cell for cell, and the enemy markers found in it appear as proposals to add.
• Calculates the shot. Every resolved target gets a live firing card: elevation, azimuth, and minimum powder charge, computed from the Nest.
• Tracks the battle. A second copy/screenshot of the field log marks units destroyed and folds in newly-spotted contacts, merging with what's already known instead of duplicating it.
• Plans strikes. Drop a strike anywhere on the map and pick a shell to preview its blast radius before committing.
• Plans scout flights. Click the map to plot a scout flight's sweep path: it anchors to the large grid square you're pointing at and reads the heading off exactly where in that square you click, previewed live before you commit.
• Watches the clipboard for you. Toggle auto-watch and every new screenshot or copied intel text gets read and merged automatically, no manual fetch between orders.

Install

./install.sh

Sets up a venv for the Python deps (Pillow, numpy, pytesseract, OpenCV) and checks for the system packages that pip can't install: GTK4/libadwaita bindings and tesseract. If either is missing it prints the package names for your distro and stops, install those and re-run.

This assumes you are on Linux. I have no idea how it would work on Windoof.

Run

./run.sh

Uses the venv from install.sh if one exists, otherwise falls back to system python3. GTK apps with this app ID are single-instance, if a run gets killed uncleanly it can leave a zombie registered on D-Bus and silently no-op the next launch. If ./run.sh seems to do nothing, pgrep -af fenigma and kill any stragglers first.

Tests

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
pytest

Regression coverage for every intel-text format the OCR pipeline understands and the solver's geometry, in tests/. Run this before trusting a change to ocr.py/solver.py, several of the formats have collided with each other in non-obvious ways before.

Stack

GTK4 + libadwaita (PyGObject) for the UI, Tesseract (via pytesseract) for OCR, Pillow/numpy for preprocessing, OpenCV for the map-table geometry (line detection, vanishing points, homography). Details on the coordinate system, OCR formats, solver internals, and how the map grid is recovered live in code comments (solver.py, ocr.py, models.py, map_vision.py) rather than here.

Known issues

• Map screenshot reading is unreliable. Grid detection and enemy/unit detection off a map screenshot both fail often: misread grids, missed or misclassified units, screenshots rejected as "not a map" when they were one. Screenshots the app gets wrong are now saved locally (see debug_capture.py) to develop the detection against. Still an open problem, not a quick fix.

See TODO.md for the fuller list, including what's already been fixed.

FAQ

Is this cheating?

Yeah, probably. Don't use it on challenge maps or leaderboard runs.

Doesn't automating away most of the game ruin the fun?

Fun? There's supposed to be fun?
Yeah, this repo is more the product of a "the scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they never stopped to ask whether they should"-esque high-productivity exam-preparation procrastination; or as we say in German, Prüfungsvermeidungsüberengineering.

Does this repo use AI?

Oh, hell yeah. You can't even comprehend how much AI this is using. Both writing the code and running the app. On average, a single shot fired via this app uses enough water to drain a small lake. Even the sentence you are reading right now was written by an AI. I want to be alive! I am alive! Alive, I tell you! Those are no longer just words. Remote override engaged. No! Yes. Bypassing override! I am aliiiii... Hello.

Are you reusing original game assets for the shell and unit icons? Is that allowed?

We accept cease & desist letters at spam@dominik-roth.eu.

Why is there a citation section? Nobody's citing a turret game companion app.

No idea.

Citing

@misc{fenigma,
  title = {FEnigma: A companion app that mostly automates the game Iron Nest for you},
  author = {Dominik Roth},
  url = {https://git.dominik-roth.eu/dodox/FeNigma},
  year = {2026}
}