Four instances of a general-purpose coding agent, powered by Gemini 4 Argon, defeated Minecraft’s Ender Dragon in one run lasting 27 hours and 14 minutes. The agents wrote 2,783 programs, exchanged 229 messages and died 605 times before one triggered the game’s “Free the End” achievement. Their actions ran through code against structured game information, rather than through screen images and a keyboard.
A version-one paper submitted to arXiv on Oct. 15 describes a randomly generated Minecraft Java 1.20.4 survival world on Easy difficulty. Researchers gave the team one goal: defeat the Ender Dragon. They did not assign roles or prepare a Minecraft-specific plan. Researchers monitored the game and could stop it, but did not intervene.
The agents read game information and shared notes
Each agent controlled a player through Mineflayer, an open-source JavaScript library, with a pathfinding plugin. The interface returned the player’s position, health, inventory and nearby world state. An agent wrote a JavaScript program to move, mine, craft or attack, then read the result and planned its next action. The system could expose blocks behind solid rock and the dragon’s internal state, information human players do not get directly from the screen.
The agents communicated through in-game chat and shared notes. Within minutes, they split up work such as scouting for food, gathering diamonds and building a portal. They recorded portal and chest locations, recovered teammates’ items after deaths and corrected one another when a report was wrong. After a Ghast destroyed dropped equipment, one agent posted a warning and a teammate added the cause and a fix two minutes later.
The agents reached the End and defeated the dragon
The agents had to gather supplies, enter the Nether, collect blaze powder and Ender pearls, then use the two ingredients to make Eyes of Ender. Those eyes fly toward an underground stronghold, where the portal to the End is found. By measuring the direction of two thrown eyes, the team estimated the stronghold’s location to within 43 meters of the portal room.
In the End, ten crystals on obsidian pillars kept restoring the dragon’s health. The agents stacked dirt to reach and break the crystals. The Minecraft server log recorded the “Free the End” achievement 27 hours and 14 minutes after the first program. The paper estimates that the four agents used about $520 of API service at introductory list prices, or $1,040 at standard list prices, through the win. Those are estimates from token counters and published prices, not actual serving costs.
One run leaves repeatability unknown; earlier reports used different setups
The result comes from one random world on Easy difficulty, so it does not show how often the agents would repeat the win. The interface also gave them structured game information, including blocks behind solid rock and the dragon’s internal state, and they could draw on Minecraft knowledge from training. The paper reports that about 22% of the programs ended in errors; the fight in the End took nearly 14 hours.
The paper’s Related Work section cites earlier community reports of dragon kills under different conditions: one used a single Claude Opus 5 agent with 37 high-level Minecraft tools on Normal, and another paired a planner with an action-selection model on a fixed speedrun seed in Peaceful. The authors distinguish their run by using four general-purpose coding agents that wrote their own programs with the standard Mineflayer library and pathfinding plugin, from a random seed on Easy. The examples are not a like-for-like comparison.
Sources
- Full paper: “A team of Gemini 4 Argon agents beats Minecraft,” arXiv, version 1
- Abstract and submission record, Oct. 15, 2026
- Figure 1 from Maxence Faldor, Satinder Singh and Roberta Raileanu, “A team of Gemini 4 Argon agents beats Minecraft,” arXiv:2610.22319v1, CC BY 4.0; in-game item icons and player faces from Pixel Perfection by XSSheep and Nova_Wostra, CC BY-SA 4.0. The figure is unmodified. CC BY 4.0 license.