Four AI agents running on Google’s Gemini 4 Argon have defeated the Ender Dragon, Minecraft’s final boss, without human help. It took them 27 hours and 14 minutes from their first program, Google DeepMind researchers wrote in a paper published on arXiv.
The agents started in a randomly generated survival world on Easy difficulty, with cheat commands turned off. Their only goal was to beat the dragon. No one gave them roles, a strategy or game-specific tools.
“To our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end autonomous completion of Minecraft by AI agents, achieved using only the standard Mineflayer library without pre-scouted seeds or other game-specific tools written by humans.” Maxence Faldor, Satinder Singh and Roberta Raileanu, Google DeepMind
Code, not keyboards
The agents never saw the screen or pressed a key. Each one controlled a player through Mineflayer, an open-source library for Minecraft bots. To act, an agent wrote a short JavaScript program, such as an order to walk somewhere and mine nearby iron. It then read back its position, health and inventory, or the error it hit.
Over the run, the four wrote 2,783 programs, swapped 229 chat messages and died 605 times. The dragon accounted for 69 of those deaths.
The agents split the work themselves. One, janesick, made tools, found the Nether fortress and located the stronghold that holds the portal to the End. It threw two Eyes of Ender from different spots, tracked their flights in code and calculated where the paths crossed. The estimate landed 43 metres from the portal room, 1.3 km away.
Another, gyldenia, gathered food and supplies. auratian lit the Nether portal, and bulicame helped build the team’s Enderman shelters and later landed the final blow. The team kept shared notes of coordinates and lessons, and recovered each other’s items after deaths.
The fight in the End took nearly 14 hours. About 21 hours in, auratian worked out that ten crystals on top of pillars kept healing the dragon. It also found the team could reach them by stacking dirt. The four destroyed all ten over the next four hours and 40 minutes. The dragon died 39 minutes later, with bulicame on 2.5 of 20 health points.
What it cost, and its limits
Up to the win, the players processed about 1.35 billion input tokens. At Gemini 4 Argon’s introductory list price, that comes to about $520, or $1,040 at the standard price, the researchers estimate. The whole session, including a fifth agent that watched for cheating and found none, came to about $810, or $1,620.
The paper lists the limits. Mineflayer tells the agents exactly which blocks and creatures are around them, even behind solid rock, and a plugin plans their routes. They played on Easy, 22% of their programs ended in an error, and the result comes from a single run. Two community projects have reported earlier dragon kills, but with game-specific tools or on a fixed, easier setup, the paper notes.
The agents ran in a sandboxed world, and their programs could control only their own player. The researchers could pause or stop the run from a live dashboard, but did not need to. Google DeepMind plans to use the same setup for coding, science and robotics work, Faldor wrote on X. Last week, cofounder Sergey Brin said Gemini now helps build the next Gemini.