AI Companion – LLM Player Bot (Ollama, ChatGPT)

0.1.9 — Builds that finish, and a companion that dies like a player

Bundles PlayerEngine 1.0.38. Self-contained jar as always — don't install a standalone engine alongside it.

The headline is that builds actually complete now. Three separate defects were stopping them, and one of them could take your world down with it.

⚠️ Existing configs — one line worth changing

If you have been running an earlier version, open config/aicompanion.json and set:

"llm": { "useGrammar": true }

It became the default in 0.1.8, but your existing config is preserved on upgrade rather than overwritten, so an older install is still running with it off. It matters: in a measured run, 9 of 21 turns came back unparseable without it and 0 of 6 with it. The symptom is the companion cheerfully narrating work it never actually starts. Fresh installs already get the right value.

Fixed

• A crash that closed your world. If the companion was holding stairs, doors, fences, chests or any other block that has a facing, block placement could throw and end the session — the integrated server died and the world shut. Fixed at the cause; placement now also orients blocks correctly instead of always facing north.
• A bug in the companion can no longer take the server down with it. Anything thrown by the AI is caught, logged and reported, and that tick is skipped. After repeated failures the companion switches its own AI off and tells you to run /companion reload, rather than throwing twenty times a second.
• Builds could not gather wood. A defect in the resource catalogue meant oak_planks, doors, stairs, slabs, fences, trapdoors, boats and signs did not exist as gatherable resources for any wood type — so a house that needed planks would fetch a torch and give up. get oak_planks 8 did not work either. Generic get planks and get log always worked, which is why this hid for so long.
• The companion no longer reports work it did not do. A build that failed on materials could report as finished, and the companion would tell you the house was done when not one block had been placed. The outcome now travels with the completion event, so a failure survives into the conversation instead of being visible for a single turn.
• A build that runs out of materials keeps its plan. Previously each retry designed a different building with a different bill of materials, so fetching what it asked for never helped — by the time you had the logs it wanted cobblestone. Collecting the shortfall and asking again now finishes the same structure.

New

• The companion drops its inventory when it dies, exactly like you do. Everything it was carrying used to vanish with it, which got worse in 0.1.8 when building started costing real materials — a companion killed on the way home took the whole load with it. It now drops the lot (inventory, armour and offhand) where it fell, and tells you the coordinates and how many stacks are there so you can go and collect them. Note that keepInventory does not apply: a companion has no respawn to carry items over to, so it always drops.
• Common structures are built without asking the model. Houses, crop fields, and walls, paths and bridges are now generated in-process. On a paid endpoint that saves roughly 4,000 tokens of prompt plus the reply and a full round-trip on every one of those builds; on a local model it is simply faster. Anything the templates don't recognise — an L-shape, multiple rooms, a request naming stairs or slabs — still goes to the model exactly as before, so nothing you could ask for previously stopped working. Templates place full blocks only: doorways are open gaps and roofs are flat.
• You can see what it's doing. Gathering reports progress in chat, shortfalls say what is missing ("I can't build that yet — I still need 100 oak planks and 1 red bed"), and a finished build reports how many blocks it placed.

Known issues

• Freeform builds still don't converge. Anything the templates decline goes to the model, which designs it without being able to see the inventory — so "build it with the materials you have" cannot be honoured, and the companion goes gathering instead. L-shaped and multi-room houses are the common case. Being worked on; templated shapes are reliable in the meantime.
• Incidental pickup fills the inventory. The companion picks up anything that lands near it, so it accumulates cobblestone and leaf drops until it has no room to gather what a build needs. Clearing it out means asking for one item type at a time. A bulk drop is planned.
• farm does not stop on its own — it runs until you tell it to stop.
• Doors and stairs in model-designed builds place wrong (a door as its broken lower half, stairs always facing north). Build plans cannot carry block states yet. The built-in templates avoid this by using full blocks only.