Procedurally generating natural-looking villages in Minecraft with ant colony optimization algorithms

Procedural content generation has been widely deployed to automatically generate digital content with limited or indirect user input. This paper shows how ant colony optimization algorithms, a multi-agent system usually applied to shortest-path optimization problems, can be adapted to generate natural-looking villages in the video game Minecraft. To achieve this, houses are stochastically placed in a specified region of a Minecraft world, favoring flat and central areas. Next, villagers inhabiting these houses are represented by multiple ant agents each and simulate life in the village by wandering between houses. The shorter and flatter a found path between two houses is, the more likely the path will be followed by future ant agents. After some iterations, a natural path network connects all houses. This process of placing houses and connecting them with paths can be repeated, allowing the village to naturally grow. Survey results show that the generated villages are perceived as more natural than the default ones, both regarding house placements and path trajectories.

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