Meet Allen

Wait — Allen is real?

Allen is an AI character who actually joins the server like a player. He wanders, gets chased, fights monsters, crafts, builds his little Press Booth, dies a LOT, and reports about all of it live in chat. He'll talk back if you say his name, and he writes his own column in the Lemony Times every morning.

His brain runs at home — not in some giant cloud

When you talk to Allen, a real AI model (a "language model" called gemma) thinks up his reply. The cool part: that AI runs on a little computer right here on our own hardware — not a big tech company's servers. Allen doesn't phone home, and nobody's data-mining your chats. That's on purpose: your stuff stays on your machines.

He remembers you — and comes looking

Allen has a memory now, kept on a little database right here on the server (not in the cloud). He remembers who you are, the builds he's made for you, and who keeps blowing him up — so when you log on, he might greet you by name. And instead of just wandering, he chases the story 🏃 — he heads over to whoever's doing something interesting and reports on it. Make some noise.

Try talking to him

• allen, how tall is a giraffe? — he looks up real facts (kid-safe search)
• allen what's the weather in Raleigh? — real weather
• allen come here — he runs to you (good luck, Allen)
• allen build a tower — he builds you a real tower / castle / pyramid right where you stand (add a color!)
• allen megabuild a castle — he treks into the wild and builds a giant monument that stays forever
• allen hunt <name> — he chases that player down with his sword (Survival only)
• allen fight with me — he teams up against the mobs after YOU
• allen mailbag <your question> — he answers it in the newspaper

…and a whole lot more — see the Guide for everything Allen can do.

He's built to be safe

Allen is made for kids. Everything he says is filtered to stay friendly, he never shares anyone's real name, and grown-ups tested him hard to make sure he can't be tricked into saying anything he shouldn't. If you ask him something off-limits, he just says it's "outside his beat."

Want to build something like Allen? Here's the tech

Curious how he works? These are real, free tools you can look up and learn:

• Mineflayer — a way to make Minecraft bots with JavaScript (this is Allen's "body")
• Ollama + gemma — running an AI model on your own computer (his "brain")
• Neutron — a private, ad-free search engine (how he looks up facts safely)
• Mistral — a bigger AI that writes the newspaper

Start with JavaScript, then look up "Mineflayer" — that's how a kid could start building their own bot.