Baritone
Baritone is an open-source Minecraft pathfinding bot created by one of Impact Client's lead developers, Leijurv. It uses the A* search algorithm to find its way.
History[edit | edit source]
Work on Baritone was started August 1, 2018. The original purpose was to automate the tedious parts of the game that required moving around the map. In other words, to automate whatever could be automated using pathfinding. Development in the early days was just to add features, and virtually no one had heard of it. Baritone was originally a port of a previous attempt to write such a bot, called MineBot.
The first step was to update that bot to 1.12.2. The first video posted was about that, then Leijurv would begin rewriting MineBot. In the first Baritone video, it could only move to the side and jump, it couldn't even descend, let alone break blocks. Integration with Impact was planned from day 1, and some videos about that gained some popularity.
A video demoing Baritone on 2b2t got a lot of popularity, which was its first connection to 2b2t. Impact 4.4 was released on October 15, 2018 and contained Baritone by default. The "Auto Mine" was by default replaced with Baritone mining diamond ore, and the "Auto Walk" was replaced with Baritone's pathfinding system.
Adoption grew during this time, in both directions. Impact users learned about Baritone due to it being built into the client, and people who just wanted to use Baritone would install Impact for the integration. In late 2018 / early 2019 support for building schematics was developed (quite slowly).
Forks[edit | edit source]
Since Baritone is open source, anyone can modify the code however they like. This has enabled some large scale projects, such as Motorway Extension Gurus' modified Baritone that dug the first Nether corner highway, or The Masonic Eclipse which also used a modified Baritone to build the largest obsidian structure in the Overworld, with over 28 million blocks.
On 2b2t[edit | edit source]
New players can use Baritone to help escape spawn, or to mine for ores. (one of its strengths) Baritone is sometimes used to navigate in the Nether when one doesn't have an elytra, or if one wants the pathing done autonomously but a bit slower. Some players also use Baritone to build schematics, as it is good at building simple schematics without many layers. For example, a flat map art of just terracotta colors, or that Jesus schematic everyone loves out of stone, or a giant cube / platform. Baritone is not good at intricate schematics like houses, or with complex blocks like slabs, stairs, or liquids.
Fit[edit | edit source]
Fit created a video on Baritone called Could an A.I. Escape Minecraft's 2b2t?, in which a Baritone fork had been written to repeatedly escape spawn while storing the exact path it had decided to take. This created a very neat looking visualization of purple and yellow lines that Fit continues to be enamored with. Beyond a few misplaced words (e.g., saying Baritone used machine learning), this video was completely accurate.
Fit was later deliberately misled into the videos 2b2t: MAN VS. MACHINE and The Man Behind 2b2t's Robot Invasion, which were completely fake. There was no neural network that learned how to play 2b2t by watching YouTubers play the server, and no robots ever invaded. All the footage of the bot supposedly "crystal pvping" was done by a human playing with weird yaw locks to create snappy movements that appeared to be robotic.
Fit's first video, in early July 2019, caused a large uptick in usage / knowledge of Baritone. By now, Baritone has been downloaded over 6 million times, and likely has tens to hundreds of thousands of active users. Fit's second two videos, although fake, added fuel to the fire of gullible people thinking of Baritone as some mythically powerful artificial intelligence.
