FruitFly Brain Mod v1.0.0

A fruit fly with a real brain. All 158,262 neurons of it, running live inside your world.

This mod adds one creature. She is not scripted. Her brain is the BANC connectome, the complete wiring map of a real female fruit fly (from codex and flywire): every neuron, every connection, about 3.1 million synapses. The mod runs that whole network live while you play. What she meets in your world drives her real receptor neurons. What her own motor and descending neurons do is what moves her body.

If she jumps, it is because her Giant Fiber fired. If she walks, turns, grooms, takes off or lays an egg, the neurons that do that in a real fly fired first. You can watch it happen on screen.

Start here

1. Install the mod with Fabric Loader and Fabric API on Minecraft 1.20.1.
2. Open a world with cheats on and run /flylab arena all.
3. 33 glass boxes appear, one per experiment. Each has a book on a lectern that explains it and a wooden button on a lime post that puts the fly inside.
4. Press a button. Read the book. Do what it says. Watch the HUD.

The first time you join, an intro screen explains the rest. You can open it again with /flyintro.

What she senses

Things in your world are fed to the receptor neurons that sense them in a real fly:

• Smell: cake, honey and compost drive one set of food smell neurons. Melon, berries, cocoa and flowers drive another. Campfire smoke drives her CO2 neurons. Mycelium and mushrooms drive her one private receptor for mould.
• Taste: sugar, bitter and water neurons on her feet and proboscis. Cake and honey are sweet, wither roses are bitter, a water cauldron or wet mud is water.
• Touch and pain: punch her and 644 bristle neurons fire. Cactus spines fire her pain neurons.
• Hearing: note blocks, bells, jukeboxes and the courtship song of a male.
• Vision: looming shapes, small moving things, the whole world turning around her, light in the dark, land on the horizon.
• Heat, cold, damp, dry, wind, rain.
• Inside her: hunger, thirst, tiredness and a day clock.

What she does

• Escapes. Something growing fast in her view makes her jump and fly off. Something directly behind her does not, because a fly cannot see there.
• Walks, rests and grooms in random instances that come from her own descending neurons.
• Finds food by smell, eats, gets full and loses interest until she is hungry again.
• Drinks from a cauldron or damp ground when thirsty, or from a water bottle in your hand.
• Learns. Hit her while she eats one food and she will pick the other one next time. The lesson is stored as weaker synapses in her mushroom body and fades in about 15 minutes.
• Finds her way home by counting her own steps on the compass cells in her brain.
• Sleeps at night. Her body sinks, her head droops and her legs fold in.
• Courts and mates. A male follows her and sings with one wing. After about 10 seconds she accepts. She lays an egg, it hatches in 30 seconds, and the hatchling grows up with its own brain.
• Fights another hungry female over food, with lunges and a loser that backs off.
• Walks on walls and hangs from ceilings.
• Flies outdoors like a fly. Indoors she mostly walks. Under open sky she takes off on her own, cruises a few blocks up, and makes long search flights when she is hungry and smells nothing. If food is upwind she catches the smell and flies up the wind to it.

She does not age and does not die of old age.

The 33 boxes

Run /flylab arena all for all of them, /flylab arena <name> for one, or /flylab arena list for the names.

Inside a box only that experiment's senses are switched on, so nothing from the box next door gets in the way. The Home box has every sense on and no experiment. It is just a place for her to live.

A pet with a brain

• Feed her from your hand with cake, berries, honey and other sweet food.
• Give her water by right clicking her with a water bottle.
• Put her on a lead to walk her somewhere. The lead only moves her body. Her brain keeps running untouched.
• Keep her under a roof and she stays close. Let her out under open sky and she will roam, sometimes far.

The HUD

Look at a fly and a live readout appears: what her body is doing, which senses are firing, which of her brain's outputs are active, her compass, memory, sleep, hunger, thirst, flight and more.

• /flyhud shows or hides it.
• /flyhud small, /flyhud medium, /flyhud big set its size.

Actions that came from her neurons are tagged [brain]. Things that are our own rules are tagged [model].

Commands

There is also a Connectome Fly spawn egg in the creative menu.

What is real and what is not

Real: the neurons, who connects to whom, how many synapses, and whether each connection excites or inhibits. All of it comes from the BANC connectome, release v888. Every neuron ID in the mod can be looked up in the public dataset.

Calibrated by us: a wiring map gives the connections, not the speeds. Neuron time constants, thresholds and a few gains are ours. How often she walks, flies and sleeps is calibrated. The moment she does, it comes from her neurons.

Labeled models: hunger, thirst, the wind, what each Minecraft block smells or tastes like, and a handful of behaviour rules. They are marked [model] on screen.

Never claimed: full consciousness, real biological timing.

The full list is in game under /flycredits.

Requirements and performance

• Minecraft 1.20.1, Fabric Loader 0.15 or newer, Fabric API.
• Needed on both the client and the server.
• Each fly brain keeps about one CPU core busy. The mod runs at most half your cores as brains at once. Extra females wait with a "brain queued" label until a brain is free. Males use a small circuit and cost almost nothing.
• On a 4 core machine, expect 2 brains at a time. Boxes that need more flies still work, but some of those flies will be waiting.
• The download is about 19 MB, most of it her brain.

Built and tested in single player. Multiplayer has not been tested yet.

FAQ

Credits

• Her brain: the BANC (Brain And Nerve Cord) fruit fly connectome, release v888 from Codex and FlyWire.
• Special Thanks to Dr.Aarie Matsliah For The interview and explanation.
• The male's courtship circuit: the male fruit fly connectome by HHMI Janelia and the University of Cambridge.
• Thank you to both teams for making their data public.
• Made by the fly project. flyproject.io

License

CC BY 4.0. Share it, re-upload it, put it in modpacks, build on it. The only condition is that you credit the project. The connectome data stays under its authors' own terms.