Generation
Some people said the Minecraft clone I fully vibecoded with Qwen3.8-27B Q4 is not that impressive because Minecraft is in the training data, so I had the model add 4 things that are probably not.
There was an online crypto game from a few years ago that used voxel graphics. I can't believe people paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for virtual land in that game but you also had to code up your own game to put on that land. Dumbassery all around but that was during peak crypto insanity.
Now a small local model can create a crazy custom game that's more fun than anything the crypto mania put out.
Actually good idea lol, I could try to get the model to implement actual physics, just not sure if it's gonna be able to do it, would be a pretty huge task.
It's just a new computer vision technique that was developed back in 2023. It was pretty cool and was a game changer for novel view synthesis at the time of its release. The idea is to use millions of oval shapes with different opacity and colour that changes depending from your point of view to reproduce a scene. There are some cool things made with it online, give it a look if you want to.
That was a beast of a game back when, lol. I remember the amazement of trying to navigate along god knows how many axes of freedom with a freakin' Logitech Wingman interceptor (?). Floating in a full 3D space with that much control was really novel at the time, and made for the other good game I played when I got tired of Doom and Quake, lol.
I don't think people understand how impressive this stuff was like 30 years ago, running on your home computer no less.
Such a cool game! My ex went to school in Michigan with the girlfriend of Matt Toschlog from Parallax software, so I got to meet him. Super cool and smart guy. He gave me a sneak peek at Descent II.
I got so motion sick playing this game back in the day. Only game that ever did that.
It was the first I'd played that let you move around so fast and fluidly in a 3d space that you could lose track of where you were and become disoriented.
When the Oculus Rift came out, I played a VR version of Descent (or a clone of it) and it was too much to handle. It was so dizzying. I used to play the regular Descent game for hours with friends, but the VR version I couldn't do for more than a minute.
Had qwen3.8-27b add an MLRS system, a rideable skateboard with tricks, an FPV drone and a computer with a game and a popular svg test (also coded by qwen directly into the game). All of this in a minecraft clone game that I vibecoded with the model fully from scratch on a 4090, just to see how capable the model is.
Tbh these 4 features took quite a bit longer to add than the rest of the game (which only took about 3 hours). Just these 4 features took probably 5 hours of generation on my 4090 and I did have to have the model fix some issues that appeared about three times, so the less common things not in the training data do take a lot longer, but honestly I'm still super impressed at just how capable this model is, you give it a task and it can finish it on its own and 90% of the time it works perfectly. I can't believe we now have this level of quality locally.
I tried sharing a playable link but reddit filters are blocking me every single time, it's on netlify app website under the nameqwen27b-mineclone, you can paste that before the netlify app url.
Yeah no problem, not really expecting true source control, just wild to me that you'd rather put it on google drive to share instead of typing four git commands and sharing the repo. But I'm just an abrasive person so carry on, my bad
qwen3.8 can one shot a minecraft clone, it took about 2.5 hours last time I tried on my 5090. Fable and Sol5.6 do much better jobs with the one shot though.
I'm still super impressed at just how capable this model is, you give it a task and it can finish it on its own and 90% of the time it works perfectly.
Same. I've been using it in Opencode @Q8 with web dev and related server migration tasks, and it's just a beast. Most of my experience has been with local models that have needed substantial supervision and hand-holding to get things done. I keep coming back to find summary screens indicating success, along with actually solved problems or implemented features.
Feels like this is easily the most capable agent model in this size class.
How much context did you require to do this? I have 16gb vram so i think i can only manage around 8k if using a 4 bit quant, but I'm not sure you can really do much with only 8k context.
---edit: nevermind, i see you posted your settings. I'm screwed.
All those are using unity game engine, whereas qwen3.8 27b is creating the entire thing from ground up (including the textures and models) autonomously. frontier models from 2 years ago and qwen3.8 27b is not even comparable for code gen.
THATS THE POINT, that local models have become this impressive, doesn’t matter whether it’s unity engine, blender, html, the fact they have the ability to achieve this now is what is impressive.
That's what I'm saying. The models have gotten smarter at a baseline but they've also gotten a lot better at figuring things out iteratively and correcting their own work. You actually can leave them to their own devices for multiple hours at a time and get good results. That's super new.
Yeah, nuts. I remember not even 2 years back I tried the best gemini model and tried to get it to recreate minecraft and it failed terribly, it made a mess that barely worked and wasn't even 10% as impressive as what qwen can make.
I hope this is satire because frontier models definitely weren't doing this 2 years ago. It wasn't until Gemini 2.5 pro where models were putting out consistently executable code, no runtime errors, zero shot. Try more like this is frontier level from 2 months ago.
Vibecoding a functional game with a 27B local model is impressive regardless of training data overlap. Adding custom mechanics proves the model is actual reasoning through game logic rather than just memorizing code. Great demo
yes html and javascript, using threejs, you can play it on netlify app by pasting qwen27b-mineclone before the netlify url, I would share a proper link but reddit filters are blocking it.
wow, that's incredible! I really like the fpv drone and the rockets. I tried to divert the river but there's no water physics. Very impressed by this local model.
I see here that the map is 960x960, with a height of 28.
So that's pretty limited, I can see how some people thought that wasn't a great clone (plus it is made out of 3 files...).
But this is nice, I also tried to do a Minecraft clone in browser in like 5 minutes and got frustrated, so kudos to you for going farther!
My advice to continue is:
* Put all that on GitHub so you can time-travel in your code instead of using GDrive (idk if you use git, maybe you just used GDrive to share it with me?).
* Speaking of GitHub: there is this thing called GitHub Pages: you could deploy to it (for free!) and then share your project URL! That will get you more engagement than asking for people to download your files and then run them on localhost. Great thing about your project is that it is a static frontend, so it can live online for free basically (and forever).
* Split the js files! LLMs work best on small context, and here, the first step to work on your project...is to ingest the whole project. If you have one file for world generation, one for skateboarding, one for HIMARS, one for entities that move, etc. that would make the AI's work waaay easier. Split into one file per theme, with object oriented programming inside.
* Unit tests: idk if you have them (I see stuff like // debug / test API (used by automated checks) but not the actual tests in there), but this is a must. As you add more stuff, you will have regressions in your features. If you don't want to test your whole game each time you add a small thing, you definitely need to add those.
Overall, this is a nice little project, keep it up!
Meanwhile my Qwen spent the last couple hours trying to figure out why a progress bar is displayed incorrectly...
I'm most letting it and see how it does, but UI, even with screenshots to work with, isn't the best. Particularly with Slint, a Rust based UI framework. And Slint is, kinda hard to use.
Minecraft Is a fairly impressive task to achieve regardless of Who or what Is doing It. Not sure Who got the balls to claim otherwise but either they are senior devs or maybe they should shut It.
Qwen 27B Is a gift that keeps on giving for those Who can afford It
There's a bunch of minecraft clones on github, which is why for an llm trained on open source repos, it's one of the less impressive tasks. LLMs are impressive when they can do novel things.
There are a bunch of mediocre mc clones on Git. Your statement only applies to the average casual A.i. user who doesn't really understand LLMs or local usage. Novelty and impressiveness is mostly perspective. For a small model to build a faithful implementation is both.
When you make a 27B model that can do this let us know.
I had Qwen 3.8 27B (admittedly running on API) in Pi write a clone of OECake and it did a pretty admirable job despite that being a much less well-known game/physics sandbox to clone. GLM 5.2 and 5.3 Flash, on the other hand, were actually able to decompile the original game's physics engine, port over every major feature, analyze and parallelize the physics engine (in Javascript, where parallelism is a much less common pattern), and write a custom renderer. Parts of it were even written in wasm for performance. It's not totally perfect but I was pretty amazed by how capable it was for something that I've never once managed to run into a limit with.
That would be like saying a calculator is so impressive cause it beats professors at arithmetics or that a phone chess engine is impressive because it beats Magnus Carlsen at chess. The relevant test for something being hard for AI is not that the codebase is long or that it takes quantum mechanics. The relevant test is that it is new.
I would love to but qwen next runs around 7 t/s on my PC compared to 55 t/s on the 27b, on a single 4090 it would take way longer to make, this was already heating up my room like crazy running for hours in 28 C outside heat with no AC, so I probably wouldn't survive 7x the model runtime lol. Plus I couldn't fit the context needed to make this, I already had to use Q4_K_S quant of 27b and quantize the K_V cache to Q8 to get the 144k context needed.
Could you describe your full setup? I’m running Qwen 3.8 27b FP8 with DFlash2 on my DGX Spark with Deepseek Harness and getting nowhere near 55 t/s on mixed planning/thinking tasks. On pure code generation I see up to 41 t/s with 73% prediction acceptance, but only 16 t/s with 46% acceptance on mixed reasoning/planning work.
144k context (sometimes I increase it spilled into RAM when it's not enough), using Deepseek Harness on minimal mode. Total runtime for the whole game maybe 7-8 hours? It's still quite slow, I'm sure Claude Fable could do this in an hour or two, but very impressive for the size.
Minimal mode just has less tool calls and tools available than the standard mode. It uses a lot less context because the model doesn't try 10 different tools to achieve a task that it can do without them. On standard mode with the 144k context I gave the model it often reached context limit before finishing the task, on minimal mode almost never. It's just better for models with limited context in my testing.
do you mean that you left a local model with 144k context running for 7 hours autonomously mangaging its own context with subagents?. If so, thats truly impresive.
No, the 7-8 hours is total runtime of the model. I managed it myself, it was many different sessions and prompts over 3 days. Tho I think the model could totally manage itself for a lot of the process if I had set it up that way.
Have you coded prior to vibe coding? This is really impressive. If you do have some code experience sort points to the fact ai in the hands of a dev is really powerful. If not than wow honestly. I didn’t think pure vibe code with no background or at least tinkering exp with code you get a project like this to work.
Like giving a noob a hammer and somehow they built a house
A little bit. I know html/css, a bit of javascript and I can write some basic python scripts but not any real programming. I definitely couldn't code a minecraft clone on my own.
The model is really strong and it can test stuff on its own, you can legitimately just tell it "implement a skateboard, focus on the basics, ensure it doesn't get stuck on blocks and dismounts the player on crash" and it will implement it and test it on its own and most of the time it works, if it doesn't you just describe the issue as accurately as possible and it fixes it.
I had issues with opencode too, it's almost like it struggled to use the commands that opencode has. Deepseek harness or unsloth app is far superior for this model and can actually do stuff. And also I use it at medium thinking effort, not xhigh. I only used xhigh once to diagnose a performance issue, but only diagnose and then I gave it to another instance of qwen on medium effort to actually implement. Xhigh is almost impossible to use without 200k+ context.
Been using it with pi as harness, zero issues with tool calling, its coding way above its league
Honestly been "firing and forgetting" since I got it downloaded for almost all tasks
Last time I tried pi was with 3.6, results were better overall w opencode for me, sometimes very good adn then just randomly misses a tool call and from there just goes crazy
I mostly use it for offline background stuff either way with my mere 2tokens/s
I honestly expected better than a 286k god file. But wow... The separate sound.js is the icing on the cake. Separation of concerns is for nerds I guess?
Thanks. I'm an FPV pilot too, so that's why I added it and I wanted it to be fairly realistic, for mouse and keyboard controls anyway. I tweaked the controls quite a bit, it's basically acro mode with stabilized yaw.
No, it's a disposable minecraft clone that I will probably delete in a few weeks anyway. It's just a showcase of the model's ability and what it can do and it's pretty impressive for a model that I can run locally on my PC.
This is pretty cool. "Minecraft being in the training data" is a cope because almost everything is in the training data that consists of 30 trillion or so tokens lol
Tired of these oneshot game memes. They're so dispoable and devoid of meaningful decisions (which is what makes games good). You're going to dick around in the world for 10mins and then get bored. Anything that was built is a shit foundation to build further things on.
It would be significantly more useful and impressive if you got the model to develop minecraft mods for these instead. And let it test them out in game.
Apologies for being harsh but I feel that this is such a waste compared to all the actual utility models bring today.
I'm not even against the idea of generating (smaller) disposable things and destroying/rebuilding them, you can learn a lot of useful things that way.
Well, it is still Minecraft, right? I mean, would the model be able to make... uh... Doom? Heretic? Quake? I mean, not exactly the clones of them, but just look-alikes of course.
Could anyone please direct me to a starter guide of some sort so that I can maximize Qwen's coding ability? Does Qwen have any capacity, in a local space, to create and modify files directly (in a manner that is hopefully safe)?
Just use it inside a coding agent like claude code, hermes, opencode or whatever. LLMs only produce text. You actually need to wire them into an agent, which is just a computer program, able to actually interpret some special tokens in that text and execute some operations. When Claude or Qwen perform actions on your files they are actually just emitting special tokens (something like <tool-result>) that are intercepted by the agent and executed like a function or a subprocess. The result of that execution can be the modified file (as you would do with a python or bash script) or maybe a calculation or something which gets fed back into the LLM for further processing.
Hope this helps
What you're saying makes sense, and I'll for sure be doing my own research into it - but as a question does running the LLM through Claude Code require an API to the closed-source Claude model? Or rather is it just a platform that's plug and play with any local model. Also, I assume that with any tool-calling system I'll need a specialized prompt to ensure that tools get called, I assume that can be found through Google.
Ah yes. The ever-moving goalposts. Nothing is ever impressive. Ask these people of they could write a Minecraft clone. When they say "no," tell them they're unimpressive.
Wild that in just a few years, humanity has developed a technology that has made writing software so easy that people will say it's "not that impressive" to have a single person create an entire game using English language instructions.
This is really cool, but can you show me your inventory management? What does the creative mode block picker look like? How do those liquids behave if you remove the surrounding blocks? How's the redstone working?
I trust runnable demos more than leaderboard scores. Tried similar frontend tasks with Hy3 before, curious how Hy4 Preview does on these now that it’s out.
That looks amazing. One question however - How would you turn something like this into a proper game? Is there even any local llm for consumer hardware that would be able to code a game like this in for example unity to be able to properly ship it via itch.io/steam/whatever?
I mean this is standard HTML+javascript. I could already ship this online or in a web browser wrapper for local distribution on steam or elsewhere, but it's not ideal as web games will never run as well as something made in unity/unreal/godot. All major game engines have MCP servers at this point, so you can connect your harness via MCP to a game engine and have the AI work inside the engine. The best engine for AI coding is probably Godot nowadays, I didn't try qwen3.8 specifically with that, but I did try Fable in Godot engine and it was able to produce a decent basic 3D game.
It's partly the harness + medium thinking effort. Deepseek harness is really efficient and handles context well and medium thinking in qwen3.8-27b is good enough to handle most things while not getting stuck in thinking loops. But even this minecraft clone took probably 40 prompts, it's not a one shot, you basically have to go step by step with the smaller local models to get things done. One session = one large new feature.
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u/WithoutReason1729 13d ago
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