# CrafterDojo: A Suite of Foundation Models for Building Open-Ended Embodied Agents in Crafter

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13530 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13530/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reinforcement learning for LLM agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 19 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Reinforcement learning for LLM agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/reinforcement-learning-for-llm-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12213/) (2024)
- [Mastering Diverse Domains through World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04104/) (2023)
- [CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08860/) (2021)
- [MineDojo: Building Open-Ended Embodied Agents with Internet-Scale Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08853/) (2022)
- [Describe, Explain, Plan and Select: Interactive Planning with Large Language Models Enables Open-World Multi-Task Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01560/) (2023)
- [Video PreTraining (VPT): Learning to Act by Watching Unlabeled Online Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11795/) (2022)
- [JARVIS-1: Open-World Multi-task Agents with Memory-Augmented Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05997/) (2023)
- [STEVE-1: A Generative Model for Text-to-Behavior in Minecraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00937/) (2023)
- [Do Embodied Agents Dream of Pixelated Sheep: Embodied Decision Making using Language Guided World Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12050/) (2023)
- [Craftax: A Lightning-Fast Benchmark for Open-Ended Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16801/) (2024)
- [Optimus-1: Hybrid Multimodal Memory Empowered Agents Excel in Long-Horizon Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03615/) (2024)
- [MP5: A Multi-modal Open-ended Embodied System in Minecraft via Active Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07472/) (2023)
- [Efficient World Models with Context-Aware Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19320/) (2024)
- [Improving Transformer World Models for Data-Efficient RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01591/) (2025)
- [Mars: Situated Inductive Reasoning in an Open-World Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08126/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Agent Learning through World Dynamics Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17695/) (2024)
- [MrSteve: Instruction-Following Agents in Minecraft with What-Where-When Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06736/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Autonomous Assessment of Generalizability of AI Agent Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16733/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Developing general-purpose embodied agents is a core challenge in AI. Minecraft provides rich complexity and internet-scale data, but its slow speed and engineering overhead make it unsuitable for rapid prototyping. Crafter offers a lightweight alternative that retains key challenges from Minecraft, yet its use has remained limited to narrow tasks due to the absence of foundation models that have driven progress in the Minecraft setting. In this paper, we present CrafterDojo, a suite of foundation models and tools that unlock the Crafter environment as a lightweight, prototyping-friendly, and Minecraft-like testbed for general-purpose embodied agent research. CrafterDojo addresses this by introducing CrafterVPT, CrafterCLIP, and CrafterSteve-1 for behavior priors, vision-language grounding, and instruction following, respectively. In addition, we provide toolkits for generating behavior and caption datasets (CrafterPlay and CrafterCaption), reference agent implementations, benchmark evaluations, and a complete open-source codebase.
