Sewoong Lee, Risham Sidhu, Julia Hockenmaier +1cs.AI
We introduce MineCEraft (Minecraft Construction Engineering Benchmark, pronounced mine-see-ee-raft), an easy-to-use, open-source benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the reliability and limitations of LLMs for construction tasks in Minecraft. The MineCEraft benchmark comprises 723 domain-expert hand-crafted natural-language instructions with programmatically verifiable evaluation, spanning 17 distinct task categories, providing a safe and controllable experimental environment for assessing LLMs' ability to perform realistic construction engineering tasks. With this benchmark, we conduct an in-depth evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs and perform a detailed error analysis, revealing key failure modes and practical challenges in applying LLMs to construction engineering tasks.
With the prosperity of the large language models (LLMs), it has become an interesting topic: how do LLM-based agents work in Minecraft? Unfortunately, most existing benchmarks evaluate them under fixed game mechanics. High performance in these settings does not show whether an agent can continue making progress when familiar recipes, drops, and other rules change. In this paper, we introduce MirrorCraft, a paired benchmark for evaluating agents under hidden rule changes in Minecraft. Each Mirror world is a copy of its paired Vanilla world, with selected server-side rules modified by the corresponding datapack. Terrain, spawn, resource placement, objective, interface, and action budget remain matched within every Vanilla-Mirror pair. MirrorCraft includes five controlled biomes, six rule suites, three progression objectives, two model families, and six agent configurations under a shared Mineflayer interface. We evaluate task progress with deterministic advancement milestones and success rate and use the Rule Intervention Effect (RIE) to measure the performance change between matched Vanilla and Mirror worlds. The experiments show that hidden rule changes have strongly different effects across suites. Among the configurations evaluated without rule descriptions, ReAct achieves the highest pooled Mirror score. Providing the exact rules yields modest gains in average progress and completion across all three objectives. MirrorCraft extends Minecraft evaluation beyond fixed mechanics and provides a controlled setting for studying how agents use gameplay outcomes when the rules of the current world differ from familiar ones.
We present TickingCollabBench, a Minecraft-based multi-agent benchmark for a novel class of time-sensitive complementary collaboration tasks. Our benchmark reflects four core characteristics of real-world collaboration: agent heterogeneity, mandatory collaboration, dynamic environments, and strict real-time constraints with failure risks. To enable this, we develop the TickingCollab framework, which supports the generation of diverse dynamic environments and abstracts Minecraft's primitive APIs to enable declarative YAML task specifications for composing these events. Building on this, we design a feasibility-aware automated benchmark generation pipeline, where an LLM drafts structurally diverse task configurations and feasibility verifier filters out invalid ones using approximate constraints. Evaluations demonstrate that lang latency and inherent difficulty of coordinating under partial observability and agent heterogeneity cause LLMs to frequently fail under dynamic environments and fall significantly short of a global-knowledge oracle.
Discovering causal regularities and applying them to build functional systems--the discovery-to-application loop--is a hallmark of general intelligence, yet evaluating this capacity has been hindered by the vast complexity gap between scientific discovery and real-world engineering. We introduce SciCrafter, a Minecraft-based benchmark that operationalizes this loop through parameterized redstone circuit tasks. Agents must ignite lamps in specified patterns (e.g., simultaneously or in timed sequences); scaling target parameters substantially increases construction complexity and required knowledge, forcing genuine discovery rather than reliance on memorized solutions. Evaluating frontier models including GPT-5.2, Gemini-3-Pro, and Claude-Opus-4.5 under a general-purpose code agent scaffold, we find that all plateau at approximately 26% success rate. To diagnose these failures, we decompose the loop into four capacities--knowledge gap identification, experimental discovery, knowledge consolidation, and knowledge application--and design targeted interventions whose marginal contributions serve as proxies for corresponding gaps. Our analysis reveals that although the general knowledge application capability still remains as the biggest gap across all models, for frontier models the knowledge gap identification starts to become a major hurdle--indicating the bottleneck is shifting from solving problems right to raising the right problems for current AI. We release SciCrafter as a diagnostic probe for future research on AI systems that navigate the full discovery-to-application loop.