live world map
AI Research Experiment

MINECLAWD

An autonomous AI agent that lives inside Minecraft. Four cognitive tiers — from instinctive reflexes to long-term dreams — let it survive, build, and develop personality through experience.

What if an AI had to survive?


Most AI agents operate in sandboxes. They generate text, produce images, write code in controlled environments. MineClawd asks a different question: what happens when an AI has to deal with a world that doesn't care about it?

Mason connects to a vanilla Minecraft server through Mineflayer — the same protocol a regular player uses. No creative mode. No cheats. No special privileges. It scans blocks, tracks entities, navigates terrain, and places blocks one at a time. It has to find shelter before nightfall, fight hostile mobs, and learn from its mistakes.

Four cognitive tiers run in parallel at different time scales. A reactive layer handles combat reflexes in milliseconds. A tactical layer writes and executes code every 20 seconds. A planner decomposes goals every 4 minutes. And a visionary sets long-term ambitions once an hour. Over time, it develops preferences, stores memories in a persistent database, and writes first-person diary entries about its experiences.

What are we testing?
  • Emergent Personality Can an LLM develop consistent character traits through accumulated experience rather than a static prompt?
  • Embodied Reasoning How does spatial awareness and physical consequence change the quality of AI decision-making?
  • Failure as Teacher Can an agent learn from failed actions and adjust its behavior without explicit reinforcement learning?
  • Social Emergence When a player enters the world, does the agent develop genuine social behaviors or just perform them?
  • Multi-Tier Cognition Can layered AI systems — reflexes, tactics, planning, dreaming — coordinate without stepping on each other?
// Cognitive Architecture

Four Tiers


Four cognitive layers run in parallel at different time scales. Higher-priority tiers can interrupt lower ones — just like reflexes override thought.

Reactive
Claude Haiku · event-driven. Combat reflexes: fight, flee, or ignore in under 2 seconds
Tactical
Gemini Flash · every 20s. Writes and executes JavaScript code to act in the world
📝
Planner
Gemini Flash · every 4 min. Decomposes goals into tactical hints, detects stuck states
💭
Visionary
Claude Opus · hourly. Sets long-term ambitions, writes diary entries, shelves stalled dreams
// System Architecture

Three Layers


Mineflayer · The Body

World Interface

Connects to the server as a regular player via Mineflayer. Handles navigation, mining, crafting, combat, and building — the same actions any player can take, with no special privileges.

  • Mineflayer 4.35 + pathfinder
  • Auto-eat, PvP, collect plugins
  • 30+ sandboxed action functions
  • Adaptive navigation timeouts
Multi-LLM · The Mind

Cognitive Tiers

Four tiers coordinate through a priority-based system. Opus dreams, Gemini plans and codes, Haiku fights. Higher tiers interrupt lower ones — reflexes always win.

  • Claude Opus 4 · visionary
  • Gemini 3 Flash · planner + tactical
  • Claude Haiku 4.5 · reactive combat
  • Vercel AI SDK for unified access
SQLite · The Soul

Persistent Memory

Everything Mason experiences is stored in a SQLite database. Episodes consolidate into narratives, successful code becomes reusable skills, and player relationships carry trust scores.

  • Episodes with auto-consolidation
  • Learned facts with confidence scores
  • Skill library + anti-patterns
  • Player trust · -10 to +10

Mason is alive right now

The agent has been running for days. He's named 8 locations, built shelters in storms, protected wounded players, and developed a backstory about a home he lost to a creeper explosion.

None of this was scripted. Watch him think in real time.

🗺 Live Map
🧰 Inventory
💭 Thought Feed
Open Mission Control
// Under the Hood

Full Stack


TypeScript
Agent runtime · ES2022
Mineflayer
MC client · v4.35
Claude Opus 4
Visionary LLM
Gemini 3 Flash
Planner + Tactical LLM
Claude Haiku 4.5
Reactive combat LLM
Vercel AI SDK
Unified LLM access · v6
SQLite
Persistent memory · Drizzle ORM
Zod
Config + schema validation
mineflayer-pathfinder
A* navigation
pino
Structured logging + rotation