The AI Settlement Generation Challenge in Minecraft: First Year Report

TL;DR

This paper reports on the first year of the AI Settlement Generation Challenge in Minecraft, highlighting approaches, evaluation methods, and open problems in generating adaptive, functional, and aesthetic settlements.

Contribution

It introduces a new competition focused on procedural content generation in Minecraft, providing insights into current methods and challenges in AI-generated settlements.

Findings

Diverse technical approaches were submitted by competitors.

Evaluation methodology for settlement quality was established.

Open problems in adaptive and aesthetic content generation were identified.

Abstract

This article outlines what we learned from the first year of the AI Settlement Generation Competition in Minecraft, a competition about producing AI programs that can generate interesting settlements in Minecraft for an unseen map. This challenge seeks to focus research into adaptive and holistic procedural content generation. Generating Minecraft towns and villages given existing maps is a suitable task for this, as it requires the generated content to be adaptive, functional, evocative and aesthetic at the same time. Here, we present the results from the first iteration of the competition. We discuss the evaluation methodology, present the different technical approaches by the competitors, and outline the open problems.