Generating Redstone Style Cities in Minecraft

TL;DR

This paper introduces a procedural city generator for Minecraft that employs multiple algorithms to create diverse city layouts, demonstrating effectiveness through competition testing and user evaluation.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel multi-step city generation method with three algorithms, including heuristic and evolving layout techniques, tailored for different terrain types.

Findings

Heuristic algorithm is faster on flat maps.

Evolving layout performs better on rugged terrain.

Generator performs well in competition and user evaluations.

Abstract

Procedurally generating cities in Minecraft provides players more diverse scenarios and could help understand and improve the design of cities in other digital worlds and the real world. This paper presents a city generator that was submitted as an entry to the 2023 Edition of Minecraft Settlement Generation Competition for Minecraft. The generation procedure is composed of six main steps, namely vegetation clearing, terrain reshaping, building layout generation, route planning, streetlight placement, and wall construction. Three algorithms, including a heuristic-based algorithm, an evolving layout algorithm, and a random one are applied to generate the building layout, thus determining where to place different redstone style buildings, and tested by generating cities on random maps in limited time. Experimental results show that the heuristic-based algorithm is capable of finding an acceptable building layout faster for flat maps, while the evolving layout algorithm performs better in evolving layout for rugged maps. A user study is conducted to compare our generator with outstanding entries of the competition's 2022 edition using the competition's evaluation criteria and shows that our generator performs well in the adaptation and functionality criteria