Considering how much of Minecraft can be about grinding for resources or MCMMO levels... imagine being able to script the player, or even being allowed "bot teammates" you can script! Since that part of it could run on just the client (minus small interface stuff on the server for clients to request basic info and send player input), you could go all out with as much advanced AI as you can muster, without draining the server of any resources... while having a bunch of minions that gather resources, fight, explore and/or build (if you have the spare processing power/memory and the scripts.. so I guess it would be dominated by people who have many crazy fast machines and mad coding skills.. but I'd still love derping around in it, too. There's always robbing those bots manually haha..).
Apart from these bots acting on their own, players could send commands to bots via private message or towny/faction chat. Oh, and speaking of towny and factions, or any sort of teams reallly: what if this sort of "Minecraft Robot Wars" competition was set up so there'd be a few human players, with each having their bots who know their owners, but otherwise nobody knowing who is a player or a bot, and who is on what side... ?!
So you could e.g. either all join up in one town/faction and give your alliance away for more efficiency/power, or split up and try to play all sorts of diplomatic games via chat and actions, and try to deceive bots/people long and short term. Minecraft online is so much about trust, I never played another game that came close; and while that can be very frustrating and petty with humans, it seems hilarious to try to code bots that act real or otherwise deceive ^^ Especially if everybody knows that it's the goal of the game.
Please, nobody make this happen, this would destroy my life. Even just thinking about the possibilities is addicting haha.
It needs a small fixes to work with the current version of Minecraft but it's pretty feature complete. We were using it internally for load testing (until we made our architecture support multiple games).
From the server's standpoint, running n players has optimistically the same cost whether those players are client-side bots or not (although, bots can be more abusive). In the MUD days (20+ years ago) this was called "multiplaying" and was usually forbidden, partly on grounds of this resource use, but some games did allow it. MMOs 10+ years ago saw an influx of people using GUI scripting tools to implement bots. It's fairly obvious when it's happening and people really don't like it for the same reasons that they often don't like server-side bots in multiplayer games.
So realistically I believe this is a niche idea which might be hard to make commercially viable. But it could be an interesting thing for private minecraft servers.
There exists a mod that lets you build mining turtles, script-able in lua. If you really want to destroy your time, look up the Technic modpack-it has all sorts of awesome stuff like that.
Mechanisation seems to be available via the collection of plugins with "Feed the Beast". I don't know much about it but several YouTubers are now using it, alongside vanilla.
Comments
Considering how much of Minecraft can be about grinding for resources or MCMMO levels... imagine being able to script the player, or even being allowed "bot teammates" you can script! Since that part of it could run on just the client (minus small interface stuff on the server for clients to request basic info and send player input), you could go all out with as much advanced AI as you can muster, without draining the server of any resources... while having a bunch of minions that gather resources, fight, explore and/or build (if you have the spare processing power/memory and the scripts.. so I guess it would be dominated by people who have many crazy fast machines and mad coding skills.. but I'd still love derping around in it, too. There's always robbing those bots manually haha..).
Apart from these bots acting on their own, players could send commands to bots via private message or towny/faction chat. Oh, and speaking of towny and factions, or any sort of teams reallly: what if this sort of "Minecraft Robot Wars" competition was set up so there'd be a few human players, with each having their bots who know their owners, but otherwise nobody knowing who is a player or a bot, and who is on what side... ?!
So you could e.g. either all join up in one town/faction and give your alliance away for more efficiency/power, or split up and try to play all sorts of diplomatic games via chat and actions, and try to deceive bots/people long and short term. Minecraft online is so much about trust, I never played another game that came close; and while that can be very frustrating and petty with humans, it seems hilarious to try to code bots that act real or otherwise deceive ^^ Especially if everybody knows that it's the goal of the game.
Please, nobody make this happen, this would destroy my life. Even just thinking about the possibilities is addicting haha.
We wrote a library to do just that (sorry): https://github.com/minefold/node-minecraft
It needs a small fixes to work with the current version of Minecraft but it's pretty feature complete. We were using it internally for load testing (until we made our architecture support multiple games).
From the server's standpoint, running n players has optimistically the same cost whether those players are client-side bots or not (although, bots can be more abusive). In the MUD days (20+ years ago) this was called "multiplaying" and was usually forbidden, partly on grounds of this resource use, but some games did allow it. MMOs 10+ years ago saw an influx of people using GUI scripting tools to implement bots. It's fairly obvious when it's happening and people really don't like it for the same reasons that they often don't like server-side bots in multiplayer games.
So realistically I believe this is a niche idea which might be hard to make commercially viable. But it could be an interesting thing for private minecraft servers.
http://www.computercraft.info/
There exists a mod that lets you build mining turtles, script-able in lua. If you really want to destroy your time, look up the Technic modpack-it has all sorts of awesome stuff like that.
Mechanisation seems to be available via the collection of plugins with "Feed the Beast". I don't know much about it but several YouTubers are now using it, alongside vanilla.
Oh, I should have known this would happen :) Thanks all!