Google develops AI algorithm 'DreamerV3,' 'the first AI that can mine diamonds in Minecraft without human data'
A research team at Google DeepMind has announced that it has developed an AI algorithm called 'DreamerV3' that can even mine diamonds in the popular game 'Minecraft.' The developer says that it excels in that it can gain specific knowledge from its surroundings and apply that knowledge.
Mastering diverse control tasks through world models | Nature
AI masters Minecraft: DeepMind program finds diamonds without being taught
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01019-w
According to Daniyal Hafner, one of the developers, DreamerV3 is an algorithm that learns its surroundings, imagines future scenarios, and improves its behavior. It allows the AI to act on its own in response to the surrounding environment without having to learn human behavior later.
'Diamond mining in Minecraft was an afterthought,' Hafner said. 'We didn't develop it specifically with Minecraft in mind, but we thought it would be an ideal test environment.'
In Minecraft, players explore a variety of terrains, including forests, mountains, deserts, and swamps. One of the items they can obtain is diamonds. To obtain diamonds, players must collect materials such as wood and stone to craft tools, then use those tools to gather higher-level materials and craft more tools. This process must be repeated.
Hafner and his colleagues set 12 milestones from the start of the game until the acquisition of diamonds, and set up a protocol that gave a reward of plus 1 each time a milestone was reached. After having an AI built based on DreamerV3 play the game under this setting, the game was reset when the player died or after 36,000 steps (about 30 minutes). This led the AI to learn basic behaviors to obtain rewards rather than getting used to one specific behavior.
With this setting, the AI apparently needs to keep playing for about nine days before it can mine diamonds for the first time. This is a very long time, but it is excellent in that it allows the AI to learn its own behavior and solve tasks in an unknown environment.
Previous attempts to have AI mine diamonds in Minecraft have involved learning from human gameplay videos or step-by-step assistance from humans, but it was not possible to have AI mine diamonds by learning new domain knowledge from scratch. For this reason, Hafner describes DreamerV3 as 'the world's first agent that can find Minecraft diamonds from scratch without human data.'
Excited to share that DreamerV3 has been published in Nature!
pic.twitter.com/EGNLmBTmAE โ Danijar Hafner (@danijarh) April 2, 2025
Dreamer solves control tasks by imagining the future outcomes of its actions inside of a continuously learned world model ๐
It's the first agent to find diamonds in Minecraft from scratch without human data! ๐
๐
Hafner and his colleagues also ran DreamerV3 on Atari games and demonstrated its ability to solve tasks in each environment.
'DreamerV3's capabilities could also be applied to robots learning to interact in the real world, where the cost of trial and error is much higher than in video games,' Hafner said.
His next goal is to defeat the Minecraft boss, the Ender Dragon.
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