Ronnie Moir - Minecraft Turtle Automated Mining

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Overview

As a fun project, I wanted to explore the idea of creating an automatic mining system in Modded Minecraft. With the ComputerCraft mod you can use Lua scripting to control a small robot called a Turtle. The turtle can perform various actions like moving around, mining blocks, transfering items and scanning its environment. Therefore by coordinating a large swarm of these turtles, it is possible to mine areas of the world automatically at a large scale.

To accomplish this, I first created a Flask webserver to act as the central controller for each turtle. I exposed some basic get and post commands to allow the turtles to fetch their tasks and deliver the results back. On top of this server I created a 3D frontend using Three.js to display the controller's current understanding of the world and the statuses of each turtle in its control. Lastly I created the turtle's lua script which polls the server for tasks and performs them, reporting back its results.

The script for the turtle had some additional requirements like:

  • Tracking its fuel and refueling when needed.
  • Tracking a ground-truth position as it performs movement actions in the world.
  • Tracking inventory space and sending off items to central storage as needed.
  • Cycling out equipment for which can only be used one at a time. For example, the GeoScanner which scans the environment, the modem which allows performing GPS requests to locate the exact location of the turtle in the world, and ender chests which allow sending and receiving items remotely.

    • These additional actions pause the current task and report the status back to the server to give the frontend useful feedback.

    Below are the screenshots of the frontend website with some additional contextual information alongside:

    A Turtle from the ComputerCraft Minecraft Mod

    Screenshots

    With turtles we can use a GeoScanner to collect the scan of the environment around it. This scan is submitted to the webserver and displayed on the frontend. From this scan the webserver can collect all the ore veins and begin dispatching tasks to available turtles. Upon completion of any task the turtle will send an update of all it's actions since its last update. This includes its new position and any changes it has made to the world, like destroying blocks.

    The frontend displays the current task and status of each turtle. For the mining tasks you can also see the target ore veins are marked. Turtle's have a limited inventory. When full, they will pause their current task and start sending back the items remotely to storage. They automatically report this status to the webserver.

    When all ore veins have been exhausted from the scanned area. A task is dispatched to one of the turtles to begin scanning the next area. Other turtles during this time will idle until this is complete.

    The turtles will continue to dig down until reaching bedrock where they will move to the next chunk and repeat the entire process from top to bottom.

    A significant area for improvement to be explored is with how ore veins are selected for each turtle. In this implementation they are simply fetched in order of the x-axis, with each turtle taking the first in the queue. This leads to pretty inefficient pathing; turtles will move back and forth across the chunk creating long movements between ore veins (Seen above). A better method would be to weigh ore veins by their distance to the requesting turtle.



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