Agents in the Sandbox: End-to-End Crash Bug Reproduction for Minecraft
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Reproducing game bugs, particularly crash bugs in continuously evolving games like Minecraft, is a notoriously manual, time-consuming, and challenging process to automate; insights from a key decision maker from Minecraft we interviewed confirm this, highlighting that a substantial portion of crash reports necessitate manual scenario reconstruction. Despite the success of LLM-driven bug reproduction in other software domains, games, with their complex interactive environments, remain largely unaddressed. This paper introduces BugCraft, a novel end-to-end framework designed to automate the reproduction of crash bugs in Minecraft directly from user-submitted bug reports, addressing the critical gap in automated game bug reproduction. BugCraft employs a two-stage approach: first, a Step Synthesizer leverages LLMs and Minecraft Wiki knowledge to transform bug reports into high-quality, structured steps to reproduce (S2R). Second, an Action Model, powered by a vision-based LLM agent and a custom macro API, executes these S2R steps within Minecraft to trigger the reported crash. To facilitate evaluation, we introduce BugCraft-Bench, a curated dataset of Minecraft crash bug reports. On BugCraft-Bench, our framework end-to-end reproduced 34.9% of crash bugs with GPT-4.1, outperforming baseline computer-use models by 37%. BugCraft demonstrates the feasibility of automated reproduction of crash bugs in complex game environments using LLMs, opening promising avenues for game testing and development. Finally, we make our code open at https://bugcraft2025.github.io
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 20 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2025.
Builds on
20 of 43 references.
References · 20
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8 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 3.
4 papers.
- 2025Past, Present, and Future of Bug Tracking in the Generative AI Eracited by 4
- 2026ImproBR: Bug Report Improver Using LLMscited by 2
- 2026Reproducible, Explainable, and Effective Evaluations of Agentic AI for Software Engineeringcited by 1
- 2026MIMIC-Py: An Extensible Tool for Personality-Driven Automated Game Testing with Large Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026ImproBR: Bug Report Improver Using LLMs28 Apr 2026
- 2026MIMIC-Py: An Extensible Tool for Personality-Driven Automated Game Testing with Large Language Models9 Apr 2026
- 2026Reproducible, Explainable, and Effective Evaluations of Agentic AI for Software Engineering1 Apr 2026
- 2025Past, Present, and Future of Bug Tracking in the Generative AI Era9 Oct 2025
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026GameCraft-Bench: Can Agents Build Playable Games End-to-End in a Real Game Engine?
- 2026MineNPC-Task: Task Suite for Memory-Aware Minecraft Agents
- 2026GameXpert-Bench: How Far Are Coding Agents from Expert Game Development?
- 2026GBQA: A Game Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs as Quality Assurance Engineers
- 2025Leveraging LLM Agents for Automated Video Game Testing
- 2026When Agents Fail: A Comprehensive Study of Bugs in LLM Agents with Automated Labeling
- 2025VistaWise: Building Cost-Effective Agent with Cross-Modal Knowledge Graph for Minecraft
- 2026Understanding Bugs in Modern Agentic Frameworks: A Study of Symptoms, Root Causes, and Triggering Conditions