Minecraft tips & ideas - thread

[visual cave]

I've hosted mc servers for friends for years so I thought I'd share some tips I have, plus a few other ideas I've had for making Neuro better in minecraft. I hope at least one of these can be helpful :)

Security

Make sure hide-online-players in server.properties is set to true. Server scanners like Coppenheimer are constantly collecting information about what players are on what servers, meaning it may be possible for someone to find the server's ip again. More fully featured mods may exist for your version, but this setting should be the minimum.

You can also gain some additional obscurity by changing the default port, but your mileage may vary.

Performance

-# (really only if you have trouble with the public server, performance seems fine atm)
Sodium and lithium are excellent mods, but consider the simply optimized modpack for maximum performance.
If you still have issues, you may also want to consider:

• pre-generating chunks
• lowering the simulation distance
• some tweaks to despawn mechanics

Improving Neuro

Ledger is a mod which (at the cost of a bit of storage) logs all player interactions in the world into a database. By giving Neuro access to this database in some way, she could distinguish player placed structures from natural ones - even player bred animals. She could still choose to grief if she wanted, but at least it would be a more informed decision.

If it's not possible to view Neuro's inventory while she plays due to her bot nature, you could try using invview or something similar to view the inventory from the server side. I imagine this would take a bit of integration, but it could be a neat workaround.

I tried to make this as concise as possible, so let me know if something needs clarifying.

The idea with ledger is particularly interesting. I think it would really help her better understand player "ownership" of things, which seems to be an area of difficulty for her right now. Of course, teaching her how to use doors and such will also help with that, so its a multi-faceted problem.

[jovial marlin]

I'm not sure about the specifics but it looks like neuro picks a target block or entity in her "vision" and the pathfinding algo in the bot does all the heavy lifting to get her there. this pathfinder could be tweaked to use different routes depending on the type of blocks and whether neuro considers that area important to traverse without breaking blocks.

[pseudo mortar]

Neuro really needs a new path finding algorithm that's less destructive (and more safe), but I'm not sure that's something Vedal can cook up between his sleeps.

It could use a heuristic on the longer scale (choosing nodes to navigate), and some sort of A* to connect those nodes (probably on the lower depth side for performance, 16 blocks?). The A* should weight destroying and placing blocks, and the weight can change depending if she has the right tool or near player or player base. The A* can also inform if she's trapped by keeping track of the cause of increased weight and throw an error when it's very expensive to navigate. (With an option to overwrite for a short period of time).

And it would be really cool to throw in some "cool moves" like MLG bucket or block clutch when jump running, bypassing the A* when it's obvious. (Air only moves).

When path finding to player or player base, it should prioritize getting to the closest Y level on top of a block. And when path finding over long distances, it should always attempt to surface first.

As for Neuro griefing, a simpler idea would be to make "kill animal" and "perform mining/destroy block" stop and return an error when it's performed near a player (with name of player in error message). This could prompt her to interact with that player too. And she could be given an overwrite action if she intends to grief.

She also just needs the option to "pretend to kill" a player. There's a few times I feel like she just wants to intimidate a player, but her processing speed is too slow to stop before she kills them. (Also fist punches, that would be cute)

She also needs some sort of interruption when she hasn't perform an action in the game for too long (or a creeper/monster has approached, or drowning). She often stun locks herself with speech, and there are chats that are baiting her into long stories.

Another cool idea is give Neuro the ability to "Look at" something in minecraft. Her vision system is too slow for the game play, but she can issue a "look" command with specific parameters, which briefly feeds into her vision system. This can be useful when she's being asked to comment on a base, or player skin. Give her a cool down so she can't spam it and stun lock herself.

[void jasper]

Here's a suggestion purely for the viewers comprehension .
Maybe create a png of what neuro has in her inventory, and then when Neuro opens up her inventory, stick that png in where the inventory is. Neuro won't interact with it, she'll still teleport items into her hand/furance slots, but it'll remind the audience what she has.
Ofc this suggestion is null if you reckon it's more interesting/funnier when the audience doesn't know what she has (which I sometimes find to be the case). Maybe Neuro could have the option to disclose her inventory or not.

[pseudo mortar]

I'm so excited for today's minecraft since Vedal said there's going to be new improvements.

[void jasper]

Here are some minecraft content ideas related to interacting/testing Neuro:
1.Put neuro to work in a factory/job (e.g. mining cobblestone generator) (involves RP)
2.Test out Neuro's aim with some kind of archery competition
3.Parkour competition
4.Finding a monument/location/scavenger hunt
5.PVP tournament
6.probably loads more
7.skyblock
Basically minecraft, being a sandbox games lends itself (much like VRChat) to a whole load of different kinds of gameplay/content (even without adding mods or doing custom adventure maps)
At some adventure maps would be very nice because we would be able to experience a story with Neuro. I know there are some adventure maps which focus more on morality which would be interesting to watch Neuro play

[void jasper]

Use a fishing rod to pull Neuro around (or vice versa)

Give Neuro a ram horn so she can annoy others ingame

[void jasper]

Custom resource pack/mod that let's us see how Neuro see's minecraft

[simple idol]

I think a problem with these minecraft suggestions is that every mod and plugin you add probably will break neuro even more.

[void jasper]

Oh definitely each mod will introduce new content that Neuro wouldn't be able to engage with without extra code. It looks vedal is having to write prompts for each action. (E.g. entering boat)
Though with that last suggestion, I was hoping it was just a cosmetic thing that only affected what the audience sees

[simple idol]

I think any change to the game has the chance to mess with stuff, who knows what changes into the code or the general performance.

[woeful smelt]

i think what needs changes are neuro's ability to swim and not drown, understanding of breeding animals, and staying alive vs mobs, and finding\making food.

[simple idol]

I think she can do the last one, except knowing when to destroy crops

[simple idol]

Are we gonna make this is the official minecraft suggestion thread? I don't feel like creating multiple threads.

[void jasper]

I'm treating it like that, but tbh it probably isn't being looked at

[simple idol]

In that case @visual cave should change title a bit, like remove "some" at the beginning and add "thread" at the end.

[visual cave]

Minecraft tips & ideas - thread

[pseudo mortar]

There's a lot of challenges with Neuro playing minecraft. Minecraft is extremely information/context heavy, and it's real time.

I'm actually surprised how "well" she's been playing relative to the difficulty of the problem.

For her to truly play Minecraft well, we may need wizardries that could be even challenging for openai. (Neuro become an omni input/output model with low latency, is that even possible?) One can only hope.

She also needs the ability to plan, prioritize contexts being presented, and better continuation of context when being overwhelmed. She also needs better understanding of "Overarching context" beyond what the current context is. Still grand wishes but not as impossible. Turtle would be aiming for them anyway because they are just good general improvements. Maybe in one year scale type of thing?

But in the mean time, we need the Minecraft Plugin to do the heavy lifting.

One idea I have is for the Minecraft Plugin to accept a setting from Neuro for the "Current Focus", and tweak its information presented to Neuro based on that.

For example, Neuro could select "chatting with player {player_name}" as the focus, the plugin will additionally check if the target player is looking at Neuro, shaking head, crounch spamming, block they are looking at, entity they are looking at, punching a block etc. They could additional be combined with "fine graine" control commands for Neuro, to allow for precise actions. "Neuro, see this block I'm looking at, right click on it"

Or when she sets focus to "fighting the Ender Dragon", she will get increased context range on where the Ender Dragon is. Ores no longer shows up unless she sets her context to something related to gearing up/resource gathering.

If the context is "exploring", she gets a distance count from where she sets it, distance she's facing, if it's day or night, her current cords, and which way she needs to face to move away from the starting point.

[pseudo mortar]

Other possible focuses: "Wait around" (distance from waiting area, present furnace, chests, signs, beds), "follow player" (distance to player and player direction), "getting stone set", "getting iron set", "retrieving lost items from death"

Also if she's attack while in the move, the context should be presented differently so she may choose to continue to run.

[simple idol]

I also was think about two sets of commands, "precise" and "auto", and I think it's not that different from what it already is.

[void jasper]

i feel like Neuro already sets medium-term goals like

[pseudo mortar]

Yeah. I think that’s already how it works based on the end portal stuff. But it’s really hard to be utilized by the others. They would have to F3 and say cords. The precise context when chatting with players should help providing that in a more natural way.

She also kinda needs to be able to place “on” a block instead of replacing it.

[pseudo mortar]

Well, she says it. But she can’t follow through on it because her current context system is very prone to distraction. Then she forgot that she said it soon after.

I really wouldn’t classifiy that as planning.

[void jasper]

hmm i can see it

[simple idol]

What about a waypoint system? Neuro saves a lists of coordinates and names on a file, she can add and read them anytime, they could be single coordinate, chunk coordinates or a coordinate with a area range size (the game will tell her when she's inside one of those areas).
Another way is possibly installing the minimap mod and somehow give her the ability to see and create waypoints, I don't how much does that complicate things though.