Maze Generation & Pathfinding in Minecraft

Recursive Division generates a perfect maze — the term of art for one with no loops, and exactly one path between any two cells — by repeatedly splitting the region with a wall and knocking a single gap in it.

Wall Follower solves it, and the pairing is the point rather than a coincidence: keeping one hand on the wall is guaranteed to reach the exit only when the maze is simply connected, which is exactly what Recursive Division produces. Add one loop to the maze and the same solver can circle inside it forever.

The maze is built in a real world rather than an empty grid, so the terrain is flattened first — the ground Minecraft supplies is not level, and a wall placed on a slope stops being a wall.

Construction is dynamic and three-dimensional through the mcpp API: the maze is placed into the live world as blocks, and a player walks the same structure the algorithm just generated.

Real-time pathfinding assistance for a player navigating the generated maze, rather than a solution printed once and left on screen.

The unit also required the same primitives written a level down, in LC-3 assembly — loops, branches, subroutines and memory operations built by hand, on a machine with no abstractions to borrow.

Built by three of us on GitHub. It is the earliest work on this site, and it is here because the algorithm choice is the kind of decision the later projects are made of.