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1. Purpose and Scope

  • Minecraft’s NBT/SNBT is inefficient for AI to handle directly (binary; a flat list of one-record-per-block) and is misaligned with the granularity of architectural knowledge (walls, roofs, symmetry).
  • Cairn is an intermediate language that aligns an AI’s general architectural knowledge with Minecraft’s voxel world — the “eyes and hands” an AI uses to see and build.
  • Full round-trip fidelity with NBT is given up. The top priority is letting an AI generate and edit builds accurately.
  • The reverse direction (NBT/schematic → Cairn) is best-effort (Ecosystem Interop).
  • The portable artifact is always the Cairn source; emitted NBT/schematics are per-target build outputs (the equivalent of a binary) (Versioning and Editions).
  • Redstone can be described at the logic level (declare signals, gates, and connections; the compiler synthesizes and place-and-routes; see Redstone). v1 is limited to combinational logic plus a curated set of sequential macros; general sequential synthesis of arbitrary state machines / CPUs is out of scope (drop to Tier 0 physical placement or raw).
  • Full NBT recovery (chest contents, command blocks, etc.) is out of scope.
  • Importing legacy numeric-ID .schematic files (pre-1.13 flattening) is not supported in v1.