Using only the standard Mineflayer library, four Google Gemini 4 Argon agents cleared Minecraft's Ender Dragon in a randomly generated world without human intervention, researchers say. They completed the game in Minecraft Java Edition 1.20.4's survival mode on Easy difficulty, with cheat commands disabled and no human input during the run.
The agents controlled their characters through the standard Mineflayer library, writing javascript programs and receiving text data about their health, inventory, and surroundings instead of seeing the game world. Researchers did not assign roles or provide game logic: the agents divided tasks themselves, coordinated through in-game chat and shared memory, and wrote and debugged their own programs.
The run lasted 27 hours and 14 minutes. During that time, the agents wrote 2,783 programs, exchanged 229 messages, and died 605 times. The agent bulicame landed the final blow with 2.5 health points remaining out of 20.
Agents involved in gameplay
Google DeepMind estimated that the agents used about 1.35 billion input tokens, putting the run's cost at $810 under Gemini pricing. The researchers described it as Minecraft's first end-to-end autonomous completion by AI agents using only the standard Mineflayer library, without pre-scouted seeds or human-written, game-specific tools.
To our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end autonomous completion of Minecraft by AI agents, achieved using only the standard Mineflayer library without pre-scouted seeds or other game-specific tools written by humans.
— Google DeepMind researchers, research team
The researchers cautioned that the experiment was conducted only once, on Easy difficulty, and that the agents received precise information about their surroundings. How convincing is this autonomous Minecraft run, given the Easy setting and the agents' 605 deaths?
As a technical journalist for VGTimes, I equally enjoy discussing the latest graphics cards and the insides of consoles and other gadgets. Since 2018, I have been writing about games and hardware; my experience in sound engineering has allowed me to understand the nuances of audio technologies well, and my love for electronics has driven me to study the insides of PCs, so I am always on the lookout for something new and interesting in the field of gaming equipment.
