2024 Settlement Generation Competition

This is the overview page for the seventh iteration of the GDMC AI Settlement Generation Challenge in Minecraft. The submission Deadline was the 15th of June, 2024, and results were announced in August 2024, both at the IEEE Conference on Games (COG2024) and online. This year's competition is now closed and results have been announced. We are sponsored by the IEEE CIS Competition Fund, which provided prices of 500, 300, and 200 dollars, for the first three places of the main competition respectively. The Settlement Generation Challenge is about writing an algorithm that can create a settlement for a given, unknown Minecraft map. The challenge is to produce an algorithm that is adaptive towards the provided map, creates a settlement that satisfies a range of functional requirements - but also looks good and evokes an interesting narrative. The goal is to basically produce an algorithm that can rival the state of the art of what humans can produce. So far there have been 5 iterations of the challenge: once in 2018, and in 2019, in 2020, in 2021 and in 2023. You can watch the presentation for last years winner's https://youtu.be/onXUUhefLyY?si=IOCcXVwIVuD8pdhG. To participate, you have to write a program that can build a settlement for an unknown Minecraft map. You have two options for producing this code: either write a script for the Minecraft map editor Amulet, or write a program for our community-developed HTTP framework, which lets you directly interface with a live Minecraft map. We can provide you with a framework and code to get started for both options on our submission-type pages. After you submit your algorithm it will be run on a range of previously unseen maps, and a panel of human judges will then evalute the resulting settlement, based on the criteria Adaptation to the Environment and Terrain, Functionality from an Embodied Perspective, Narrative Integration, and Visual Aesthetics. Submission To submit to the 2024 GDMC AI Settlement Generation Challenge you need to fill out the Google forms link below: SUBMISSIONS ARE CLOSED Submission of your code is via a link, so you should have a link to a repository, such as GitHub, or a link to a cloud storage service, such as Dropbox, ready. We will ask you if you agree to share your submission publicly. We encourage you to do so - and if you do, we will share you code after the evaluation period. We suggest you also attach an appropriate license to your code, such as https://opensource.org/license/0bsd . After the submission, we will likely ask you, in the two weeks following, to apply your code to a set of competition maps. We will send instructions for this via the email provided to us. So, please check your email.

Previous Years 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022,, 2023 Conferences IEEE Conference on Games (COG2024) Submission Languages Python, Java, other. Submission Types HTTP Framework Amulet Minecraft Version 1.20.2 Deadlines: Submission: 15. of June, 2024 Results: August, 2024

Competition Call The competition is now closed, but we maintain the original competition call here for archival purposes. Overview To participate, you, or a team, have to write some code that can generate a Minecraft Settlement for an unseen Minecraft map. We accept submissions in several frameworks, see below. You submit the code, together with some additional information to us before the deadline. We will also support submission via link, i.e. a link to a github or similar repository of your code. The code will then be applied to 5 different locations within a large map, which are not known before the deadline. We will likely ask you, as the author of the code, to run the code on the maps, and send us the resulting maps. The resulting settlements will then be sent to a range of expert and volunteer judges, who use Minecraft to look at and interact with the settlements, and then assign scores to each generator. We then announce the results - including who got the highest score and relating the settlements, code, and feedback publicly. Rules To participate you need to submit your code to our website before the deadline. Team submissions are allowed. Anyone is able to participate. One submission per person / team only (We have considered exceptions for academic supervisors who led several teams - please contact us to discuss) Unless you object specifically, we will publish the code and attached documentation after the evaluation period. You keep ownership and rights to your own code and work - but unless you object we assume we can share it and use it in our material. If you have any further questions about the rules, please ask them on our discord, so we can clarify: Join Discord Winners will be announced in August 2024. At the same time, we will also publish the detailed evaluation results online for each algorithm. Once the results have been announced we will also publish the competition maps, the settlements generated by the algorithms, and the participant's description of their algorithm. We also encourage participants to publish their code, but this will not be mandatory. Unless participants object to sharing their code, we will make it available on our website with an appropriate open-source license. If they decline, we will not publish the code. In either case, the organizers will not take exclusive ownership of the code. You can find previous years' maps, code, resulting settlement, evaluation scores, and other things on our website. Evaluation In general, participants submit code, this code will be applied to several Minecraft maps unknown to the participants beforehand, and the resulting settlement will then be evaluated by humans. The human scores determine the winner. The detailed evaluation methodology, including scoring criteria, and list of awards can be found on our evaluation page. These are the instructions sent to the judges in 2024. It includes download links, settlement locations and detailed scoring guidelines. Awards In 2024 we will be awarding the following awards, see the evaluation page for details: Best Settlement - the main GDMC AI Settlement Generation Challenge Best Underground Structure - a new award, based on judges' choice Best Chronicle - optional challenge, awarded based on judges choice, need to opt-in at submission time. Innovation Award - awarded by organizers and developers, aims to recognize technical and conceptual novelty. The Best Settlement award is our main competition, and the first three teams will win 500, 300, and 200 US dollars respectively. We are sponsored by the IEEE CIS Education Competition Fund. Submission We support two submission options in 2024, either write code for an HTTP client that interacts with the HTTP framework or submit an amulet script. See valid submission methods page to see all current methods. Results In the year 2024 we had 5 submission, 4 using the HTTP framework, and 1 using a self-developed framework. The 2024 winner announcement on Youtube Awards 1st overall: Team SpecificProtagonist (Winner of 500 US dollars) 2nd overall: Team Shadow Wizard Money Gang (Winner of 300 dollars) 3rd overall: Team PanderWorld (Winner of 200 dollars) Best Underground Structure: Team Niels-NTG Best Chronicle: Team PanderWorld Results Table Full table, including comments can be downloaded here. Comments are on page two of the sheet. Submissions All submission in 2024 where made via GitHub and all participants agreed to share their code. See below for the link to each teams repository. SpecificProtagonist https://github.com/SpecificProtagonist/frightful_hobgoblin "Frightful Hobgoblin is written in Rust and works on the on-disk format of a world. It runs a simulation wherein individual villagers gather materials and use them to contruct buildings. Buildings (lumberjack, quarry, house) are placed individually. Trees regrow to supply lumberjacks. Trees and building styles are determined by biome. Each tick of the simulation corresponds to a tick in Minecraft; the changes in that tick get written to a datapack that then replays the simulation in Minecraft so you can watch the settlement grow. Because the amount of commands (~1.5m) crashes Minecraft otherwise, they're stored in nbt." Last Minute https://github.com/Xeon0X/GDMC-2024 "Our generator is capable of generating houses, buildings and roads to suit the terrain. We use filters (sobel, gaussian…) on the heightmap to isolate areas of interest. We use the skeleton of this shape as a guide to place the roads. Buildings are made from modular patterns that are assembled according to certain conditions. You'll find more details in the readme (when it's done). You can also contact us if you need to." PanderWorld https://github.com/GDMC-Group2/PanderWorld Our settlement, PanderWorld, is underground, where pandas live together peacefully. The name is derived from Panda and Underworld. Please check our narrative (for the Chronicle Challenge) about why they have to live like that. (Spoiler Alert!: our concept this year is inspired by Fallout). We have adapted several elements from our previous settlements, PandaVision in 2022 and PandaVision II in 2023. The main features of the settlement include environmental adaptability and aesthetics. Shadow Wizard Money Gang (SWMG) https://github.com/Jandhi/grimoire "Grimoire divides the build area into districts, categorising and merging them into larger superdistricts. Any districts which are considered too rough, steep or in any way unsuitable for construction, as well as those on the border of the build area, are considered ""off-limits"". There is a single cluster of urban districts surrounded by a city wall. Within this urban cluster, roads are generated along the seams of the districts, and buildings are generated within ""blocks"" (in the sense of a block of flats) in the district. Any remaining space within a block becomes a ""nook"", which is then decorated according to the constraints of the space and the nook configurations provided, creating rich outdoor spaces. Beyond the walls, pathfinding is used from each of the city gates to create country roads, which are populated with signage to direct players to the settlement." Niels-NTG https://github.com/Niels-NTG/GDMC2024 "Vault of Immeasurable Knowledge builds a library in Minecraft of books containing the metadata of every work ever published to the free public research repository ArXiv. The layout of the library is created using a simple implementation of Wave Function Collapse (WFC). For this to be ran locally you will need pull the dataset with git LFS (recommended) or create the dataset yourself by downloading the latest ArXiv dataset from Kaggle and running it through the splitByCategory() function is bookTools.py. A buildarea needs be be set before the generator can run." Maps This year we used one large map and asked the participants to generate settlements in three different locations on that map. We added a teleportation book that allows judges and players to teleport to the center of the three regions for easy accessibility. You can download the full set of maps here. Generation Instructions This year we asked the participants to generate the maps, based on the following generation instructions: Instructions FAQ Here is a short FAQ.