Autonomous Minecraft

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  The man himself

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  The parkour course

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  Machine & Maker

Inspiration

I’ve always enjoyed Minecraft, but college has limited the amount of time I have to play games. This robot seeks to remove the grind so I can get straight to the ‘meat’ of Minecraft.

What it does

So far, the bot can connect to a Minecraft server, read the chat, and autonomously navigate the word either by moving to the player or by moving to a specified coordinate

How we built it

The bot uses the mineflayer API to handle server communications and the A* pathfinding algorithm. The bot is written entirely in python and communications are handled by talking to the bot on the server.

Challenges we ran into

Python’s lack of type checking and my own carelessness caused several annoying and hard to find bugs which cost a lot of time. Additionally, some of the methods provided in the API were broken or produced unexpected results

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The bot’s movement is fluid and quick and has produced a solid base for continued development

What we learned

How to use python event listeners and most importantly that slow and steady wins the race. Being in a rush meant much of my code left a little to be desired and python’s hands-free attitude when it comes to types caused me quite a few headaches, in the future I either won’t use python or will be much more careful.

What's next for Autonomous Minecraft

With a solid base for pathfinding, I’d like to work on the other main components to automate the grind out of Minecraft, mainly autonomous resource gathering. Movement was half the battle, now I’ll need to find resources, navigate the bot to the resource, and gather it – easier said than done. Beyond that I’d like to setup some kind of schematic system to allow the bot to build its own home and even some kind of web-based command and control center to control my army of robots when I’m away.

Built With

• python