Four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft with no human help

Minecraft has no single level to clear. To reach the end from a random start, you need a long chain of steps where each one depends on the last.

• The Overworld: punch trees, make tools, find iron and diamonds, build a portal.
• The Nether: a fiery second world where you collect blaze rods and ender pearls.
• The stronghold: a hidden underground structure that holds the portal to the End.
• The End: a floating island where the Ender Dragon lives, healed by ten crystals on tall pillars.

Back in 2022, the MineDojo research project called defeating the dragon, starting barehanded in a fresh world, one of its "moonshot" goals. For humans, the HowLongToBeat median for the main story is 45 hours, the paper notes.

The paper, by Maxence Faldor, Satinder Singh and Roberta Raileanu, was posted on October 15. Its claim: "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."

The agents never saw pixels or pressed keys. Each one controlled a player through Mineflayer, an open-source JavaScript library for Minecraft bots.

An agent acts by writing a short program, something like "walk to these coordinates and mine every iron ore within 16 blocks." The bot runs it, and text comes back: position, health, inventory, or the error it hit. Then the agent writes the next program. The median program ran for 33.5 seconds.

Think of it like playing a video game by texting instructions to a friend who holds the controller. Your friend does exactly what you say, nothing more, so every mistake is yours to debug.

The setup, according to the paper:

• Game: Minecraft Java Edition 1.20.4, survival mode, Easy difficulty, random world.
• Rules: cheat commands off, no human input during the run.
• Instructions: one paragraph naming the goal, plus the same general rules the agent gets for any job, like verify each action and record lessons in shared memory.
• Help: none. No roles, no strategy, no game tools, no route.

A fifth agent, the Observer, watched as an independent witness. Its job was to check the players' claims against the record and flag any cheating. It found none, and none of the programs used a server command.

The agents did, fast. Ten minutes after the first program ran, the agent named janesick proposed a division of labor in the chat. Within a minute, auratian answered with a different plan, and gyldenia replied "Copy that!"

Roles settled from there:

• janesick: smelted iron, made tools, found the Nether fortress.
• gyldenia: scouted for food and supplies, and later destroyed six of the ten crystals.
• auratian: prepared and lit the Nether portal, and cracked the dragon fight.
• bulicame: dug for diamonds, built Enderman shelters and landed the final blow.

Within two hours, the team had iron tools, diamonds and a lit Nether portal. In the Nether, three of them built two-block-high shelters. An angry Enderman, at nearly three blocks tall, cannot fit under a two-block ceiling, so the pearls came to them. Five and a half hours in, the team had 15 pearls in a shared chest.

In real life If you have ever played Minecraft with friends, this is the voice chat you know: "I'll get wood, you find iron, someone please make a bed." The agents just did it in text, and kept notes.

It wasn't smooth. Bringing blaze powder back took more than six hours. janesick burned to death carrying twelve of it, and a Ghast fireball destroyed a pile of dropped items. After that, auratian posted a lesson for everyone, and janesick followed two minutes later with the root cause and a fix.

With geometry. A thrown Eye of Ender flies toward the nearest stronghold. janesick threw two from different spots, sampled each eye's flight every 50 milliseconds, and calculated where the two lines crossed.

The answer: 1.3 km from the village. The estimate landed just 43 meters from the actual portal room.

Then came the scare. auratian drowned carrying all twelve Eyes of Ender. janesick and auratian sent bulicame the exact spot and the minute the items would vanish. bulicame grabbed all twelve with two and a half minutes to spare. At 13 hours and 17 minutes, the End portal was lit.

Because the dragon kept healing. The End was where the team slowed down: the dragon killed them 69 times.

Between attempts, the agents read the dragon's internal state from the game and wrote rules. Never wait on the arrival platform. Approach only while it is perched. If it gets stuck, leave the End to reset it, which they did by jumping into the void on purpose, a trick human players use too.

The breakthrough came about 21 hours in. auratian pointed out that the ten crystals on the pillars kept healing the dragon to full, and found a way to reach them with no pickaxe: stack dirt, climb, punch the crystal, dig back down.

Over the next four hours and forty minutes, the team destroyed all ten. Thirty-nine minutes after the last one fell, the dragon died. bulicame finished it with 2.5 of 20 health points left.

By the numbers: the run took 27 hours and 14 minutes, about 81 in-game days. The agents wrote and ran 2,783 programs, exchanged 229 messages and died 605 times. Six server restarts paused the world for about 20 minutes in total.

Up to the win, the four players processed about 1.35 billion input tokens, 91% of them served from cache, and about 16 million output tokens over roughly 24,000 model calls.

The whole session includes the Observer and a day of activity after the win. The researchers say these are estimates from list prices, not what it costs Google to run the model. Engadget and The Decoder also reported the figures.

The agents also built their own toolkit along the way. They kept 42 helper functions alive between programs. One fix for a crafting quirk, first flagged by gyldenia 19 minutes in, showed up in 655 programs written by all four agents.

The catch: the researchers list the limits themselves, and they are real.

• Easy mode: monsters deal less damage than on Normal or Hard, and hunger cannot kill a player.
• Superhuman sight: Mineflayer tells agents exactly which blocks are around them, even behind solid rock, plus the dragon's internal state. Playing from pixels with a keyboard and mouse remains much harder.
• Prior knowledge: Gemini 4 Argon already knows a lot about Minecraft from its training data. The test is turning that knowledge into working code and teamwork, not learning a new game.
• Lots of failure: 22% of programs ended in an error.
• One run: it was the first launch they tried, so it cannot show how reliably the setup works.

The paper also credits two community projects that killed the dragon recently. One used a single Claude Opus 5 agent with 37 high-level Minecraft tools on Normal difficulty. The other paired a planner with an action model on a fixed speedrun seed in Peaceful mode. Google's version gave the agents less help.

Why it matters: the researchers say the skills here, coordinating a team, recovering from failure and pursuing one goal for more than a day, are what agents need for real software and business work. That's also the pitch behind Gemini 4 Argon's recent rollout to the Gemini app and developers. More of our Google coverage is here.

• Nothing to download: this was a research run, not a product or a Minecraft mod you can try.
• AI agents are getting patient: a day of work, thousands of steps and hundreds of failures without a human stepping in is new territory.
• Teamwork is the real story: splitting work, sharing notes and correcting each other is what makes agents useful on long jobs.
• Kids still win on sight: these agents saw the game as data, not pictures, so your controller skills are safe for now.