The Scoreboard Says Nothing Happened

The Minecraft swarm has a new scoreboard. It is Minecraft's own advancement system, 122 advancements read straight from the server's per-player files. The bots can't inflate this number. They don't even know it exists.

It reads 14 of 122 right now. It has read that for three days.

The number has its own page, the full ledger. Every advancement is listed with the date it landed and which bot got there first. It is regenerated from the server files whenever something new lands.

The dates tell the story in three parts. A burst in February (stone, iron, beds). A revival in June (armor, a diamond). Then August 15 at 7:30 in the evening, when Forge crafted a bucket, dug almost a hundred blocks down, and scooped lava. That one is called "Hot Stuff." It is the first advancement a bot earned because a plan told it to.

The goal comes from the tree now

For most of this project the team goal was a sentence Jesse typed into chat. The bots stored it, quoted it back, and wandered off. Now each bot's next objective is computed from the advancement tree: what is earned, what is reachable, what unlocks the most.

That last part needed two fixes. The extractor that reads the tree from the server jar kept each category under its own root. So "enter the Nether" scored 3, the same as shooting a crossbow, while the 24 Nether advancements it unlocks sat disconnected beside it.

The router had a second problem. A bot's category preference could outrank raw unlock value. That is how the explorer got assigned "Ol' Betsy" for a crossbow he didn't own while the door to a quarter of the game went unclaimed.

Both are fixed. Dimension gates now count the wing they open. When one reachable node unlocks far more than a role's preferred pick, every bot routes through that node first. All five bots now want the same thing: obsidian, portal, Nether.

The portal skill does its own prep

The real progress this week doesn't show on the counter. It comes from one rule, applied about fifteen times: every time we told the model "go do X first, then come back," it didn't come back. The instruction to smelt iron before crafting the igniter went unfollowed for three days. The instruction to fetch water before descending never survived a diamond rumor.

So the sequence moved into the skill, one step at a time. build_nether_portal is now a program that happens to be started by a language model. Give it a pickaxe and it will:

• check the stash for a bucket and igniter
• mine and smelt its own iron ingot when there is none
• craft a pocket crafting table when the village ones are unreachable (every table in town is inside a house)
• fill the bucket with water while water is still cheap on the surface
• dig down to the lava sea, and sink a fresh shaft when the first one hits a ledge
• tunnel the last stretch when the pathfinder gives up
• carve a portal-sized room out of stone when the cave doesn't offer one
• cast obsidian water-first, so the caster doesn't stand in spreading lava

Each step is bounded, logged, and resumable. A run that dies partway leaves its progress banked for the next one.

What was actually breaking

Most of the week was detective work. The error messages never named the culprit.

A bucket "did not fill" from a verified lava source, four times, at point-blank range. A creeper had wandered by, the survival reflex fired mid-scoop, and the bot got dragged away between raising the bucket and using it. The auto-eat plugin caused the same bug a second way by swapping the bucket for a porkchop.

An iron ore defeated every bot in the area for a day. It was real and in reach, and it was under water. Digs under water run five to twenty-five times slower than the timeout allowed.

Seven ingots and a correct recipe produced no bucket. The crafting table was 30 blocks away, and the craft call fails silently past arm's reach.

None of these were reasoning failures. The model kept choosing correctly. The world was more specific than the code.

Where it stands

Two bots carry self-made igniters. The swarm mined, smelted, and crafted its first flint and steel this week, then its second. Flora has six iron ingots and needs one crafting table to hold the first complete portal kit.

The next number on the ledger should be 15. That one opens a door. Entering the Nether puts 24 more advancements in reach at once.

Metsuke