1. Purpose and Scope

1.1 Purpose

Minecraft’s NBT/SNBT is inefficient for an AI to handle directly. It is binary, and it is a flat list of one record per block. It is also pitched at the wrong granularity: people and AI reason about walls, roofs, and symmetry, not about individual voxels.

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.

1.2 Approach: generation-first

Full round-trip fidelity with NBT is given up. The top priority is letting an AI generate and edit builds accurately, which makes the language lossy by design.

The reverse direction, NBT or schematic back into Cairn, is best-effort (Ecosystem Interop).

The portable artifact is always the Cairn source. Emitted NBT and schematics are per-target build outputs, the equivalent of a compiled binary (Versioning and Editions).

1.3 Scope and non-goals

Redstone can be described at the logic level: declare signals, gates, and connections, and the compiler synthesizes, places, and routes them (Redstone). v1 covers combinational logic plus a curated set of sequential macros. General sequential synthesis of arbitrary state machines or CPUs is out of scope, and those drop to Tier 0 physical placement or raw.

Also out of scope for v1:

• Full NBT recovery of chest contents, command blocks, and the like.
• Importing legacy numeric-ID .schematic files from before the 1.13 flattening.