The evidence: the 1.31 Point Release patch notes carry a dedicated Bot Improvements section, and the community wiki documents the practice mode where bots are available. This is not an inference from a menu label — the publisher shipped a list of changes to bot behaviour in its final patch.
Where you can play against bots
| Place | How to reach it | What it is for | Source (level) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Practice | Listed on the left side of the play menu | Learning maps, weapons and movement without a live opponent | Fandom wiki (C) |
| Humans vs Bots | A dedicated playlist | Playing full matches with and against bots | Fandom wiki (C) |
| Custom Game | Rightmost option in the game mode menu | Setting the mode, map, Champion and AI difficulty yourself | Community reports (C) |
Which modes bots support
Practice mode covers Team Deathmatch, Clan Arena, Capture the Flag, Slipgate and Sacrifice, according to the community wiki. Custom games let you pick the mode and map directly, including modes that are hard to find a queue for at quiet hours.
What 1.31 changed about bots
The final patch is the most substantial bot update the game received, and it is worth knowing what your practice partners can now do.
| Change | Effect |
|---|---|
| Level 0 marker on the scoreboard | New players can tell bots apart from humans at a glance |
| No more five-second perfect aim after an ability is fixed | An old burst of superhuman accuracy was removed |
| Own totems and turrets no longer treated as enemies | Bots stop wasting abilities on their own team's deployables |
| Incoming rockets recognised and dodged | Bots evade projectile fire instead of standing in it |
| Less predictable sideways dodging | Their evasive movement is harder to read |
| Movement adapts after taking damage | They reposition rather than holding a losing angle |
| Health management | They disengage and retreat instead of fighting to the death |
| Mechanical skill boost for losing bot teams of 3+ | A handicap that keeps one-sided matches closer |
Source for all rows: 1.31 patch notes (level A).
Bots are not a multiplayer replacement
Two community findings are worth knowing before you rely on them:
- Bot abilities land at 100% when used. Community reports describe bots hitting their abilities perfectly on use, with some Champions being notably harder to face because of it. Balanced against that, their general aim and decision-making are now more human-shaped than in earlier builds.
- Custom games and bots still need an internet connection. Quake Champions has no offline mode. A bot-only custom game is still an online session, so a dropped connection ends it. Several community threads state this explicitly, and it is the single most common misconception about bot play.
What bots mean for the bigger questions
- For “can I still play”: yes, even when the population is quiet. Bots cover practice and custom games, and the Humans vs Bots playlist removes matchmaking from the equation entirely. See is Quake Champions dead.
- For “is it worth buying”: bots raise the floor of a low-population purchase considerably, because you are never fully locked out of play. See worth it in 2026.
- For progression: community reports say bot-only custom games still award experience even though they do not count toward challenges. Level progression therefore continues, but challenge-style objectives do not.
What would change this answer
This answer would change only if bots were removed from the game or made unusable — an update that is not planned, since Bethesda has stated no additional content updates are planned. A reduction in bot features would have to arrive as part of a patch that does not exist yet. Note also that this page relies on community documentation for where bots appear, so if the menus were reorganised the routes above could drift even though the bots themselves remain.
Where to go next
- Start practising: the gameplay page explains what to learn first and in what order.
- Tune the experience: the settings page covers the readability aids that help against bots.
- Check the live population before queuing for humans: player count.
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