Nova Quantum

By Seidr Labs — a Fabric mod that adds a voice-controlled AI companion to your Minecraft world.

Quantum is a Fabric mod for Minecraft 1.21.11. She joins your world as a real entity, listens for spoken commands, and plays beside you — mining, crafting, building, and defending — while following the same vanilla rules you do.

Quantum is the in-progress successor to the original Nova AI Minecraft Friend mod (~30k lines, archived 2026-05-11). This is a clean rebuild from the lessons of that project — smaller surface area, strict modular architecture, vanilla-rule-correct, and built to survive Minecraft version changes.

Required: your own OpenAI API key

Quantum's voice and AI features call OpenAI's API using a key you provide. The mod boots and loads without one, but the companion will be silent and unable to understand spoken commands until you supply a key.

On first launch the mod creates config/quantum/secrets.json with a placeholder. Replace REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_KEY with a key from https://platform.openai.com/api-keys.

You pay OpenAI directly for usage. There is no Seidr Labs middle-server, no proxy, no shared key. Costs depend on how much you talk — typical voice-heavy play is a few cents per session.

Network and privacy

The mod talks to exactly one external service when AI features are in use:

Endpoint	Used for	Trigger
https://api.openai.com/v1/audio/transcriptions	Speech-to-text (Whisper)	When you push-to-talk
https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions	Intent classification + reply text	After transcription
https://api.openai.com/v1/audio/speech	Text-to-speech	When Quantum replies aloud
https://api.openai.com/v1/embeddings	Semantic memory	Optional, only if memory feature enabled

That's the complete outbound network surface.

• No Seidr Labs telemetry. Nothing is sent to seidrlabs.online or any Seidr-controlled server. The mod does not phone home.
• No third-party analytics. No Sentry, no Google Analytics, no crash reporters.
• Your audio and prompts go to OpenAI. That's intrinsic to using their API. You're paying them, you're sending them data — same as if you were using ChatGPT directly.
• Conversation memory lives locally. The last several turns are stored in your Minecraft save folder, not in any cloud.
• API key never leaves your machine except inside the Authorization: Bearer ... header on the calls above.

Features

Voice control

Push-to-talk capture is bound to a configurable key by default. Recorded audio (≥500 ms) is transcribed by OpenAI Whisper, the transcript is routed through a small set of fast in-mod intent rules, and anything not handled locally is sent to a chat-completions model for natural-language understanding. Confidence thresholds prevent her from acting on ambiguous instructions. Examples that work today:

• "find me ten diamonds" → she heads underground, descends safely on a stair pattern, and starts mining
• "follow me through this cave" → she paths behind you using vanilla navigation
• "defend me" → switches to a sword/bow loadout and engages hostile mobs near you
• "open inventory" / "hold this" → opens her menu so you can give her tools, food, blocks

Mining and resource gathering

Stairs-descent pathing for safe vertical travel. Recognises a curated catalogue of vanilla blocks and mobs (loaded from JSON; no hard-coded magic). Tunnels, navigates around obstacles, and stops when the request is satisfied or her inventory fills.

Combat

• Auto-swaps to the best weapon she's carrying for the engagement (melee → sword, ranged → bow)
• Shield blocking with realistic durability cost
• Kite-creeper behaviour: backs off when a creeper is fusing
• Targets the nearest credible threat first, switches if a closer one appears
• No aim-bot, no through-wall hits, no other vanilla-rule violations

Safety chains

A small library of "safety chain" behaviours that interrupt her current task when something dangerous is happening:

• FoodChain (shipped) — eats from her inventory when hungry
• FallSafetyChain (shipped v0.8.112) — places a water bucket under her at the impact point if she's falling more than three blocks and has a water bucket on hand. Behaves like a player MLG.
• LowHpFleeChain (in development) — disengages and regenerates when health drops below a threshold
• MobDefenseChain (in development) — proactive engagement of nearby threats during non-combat tasks
• EmergencyUnstuckChain (in development) — recovery behaviour when her pathing gets stuck on terrain

Each chain lives in shared code and uses platform-side helpers, so the same behaviours port cleanly to future Minecraft versions.

Conversation memory

Quantum remembers the last several turns of conversation across sessions. State persists when you log out and is restored when you log back in. Stored in your local save folder, never uploaded.

Despawn-safe inventory

When she despawns (you log out, she dies, the chunk unloads), her inventory is preserved and restored on respawn. No item loss.

Audio

Text-to-speech replies are generated by OpenAI's /v1/audio/speech endpoint, then played through Minecraft's existing OpenAL context — so her voice plays through the same audio device your game uses.

In-game menu

A dedicated G-key menu opens Quantum's status, inventory, and behaviour settings without leaving the world.

Installation

1. Install Fabric Loader 0.18.1+ for Minecraft 1.21.11
2. Install the Fabric API
3. Drop quantum-X.X.X.jar into your .minecraft/mods/ folder
4. Launch Minecraft once to generate config/quantum/secrets.json
5. Edit that file and replace REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_KEY with your OpenAI API key
6. Launch again — Quantum is now voice-enabled

The mod loads with or without an API key. Without one, you'll still see the entity and the G-menu, but voice/AI features will be inactive.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.11 (Fabric)
• Fabric Loader 0.18.1 or newer
• Fabric API
• Java 21+
• Both client and server (the mod is required on both sides for multiplayer)
• An OpenAI API key for voice / AI features

Project status

Quantum is in active pre-release development (current build v0.8.x). Major systems — voice routing, navigation, mining, combat, food, fall safety, despawn restore, conversation memory, audio, G-menu — are working and tested in continuous play sessions. Remaining safety chains (LowHpFlee, MobDefense, EmergencyUnstuck) are mid-port from the original Nova codebase and will land across the v0.8.x → v0.9.x series.

It's playable today, it works, but expect a version-bump cadence and the occasional behaviour change as the port completes.

About Seidr Labs

Seidr Labs is a small studio that ships focused, single-developer-maintained Minecraft tooling. No required Seidr-side services. No telemetry. Sane defaults. Production-tested before public release.

Sister project: NovaSync — server-side admin/networking backbone for Paper 1.21+.

Links

• Project home: https://nova-ai.online
• Studio: https://seidrlabs.online
• Community / Discord: https://discord.gg/9CwtGJsznq
• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/Nova_AI_Companion
• YouTube (devlogs / demos): @Nova_Ai_MC_Mods