With the amount of new subnets being added it can be hard to get up to date information across all subnets, so data may be slightly out of date from time to time
With the amount of new subnets being added it can be hard to get up to date information across all subnets, so data may be slightly out of date from time to time
NeverPlayAlone (SN98) is a Bittensor subnet dedicated to competitive benchmarking and deployment of AI agents that play Minecraft alongside real human players. The subnet operates on a winner-take-all model: every round, miners submit sealed AI agent packages that compete head-to-head across deterministic Minecraft missions, and the single best performer takes the full emission reward. The premise is simple but powerful — Bittensor’s incentive mechanism is used to continuously surface the most capable, human-compatible Minecraft AI agents, which then power a real commercial product.
Miners on SN98 build Node.js-based agents using the mineflayer protocol library, packaged as compressed tarballs. These agents must join live Minecraft servers and autonomously complete defined missions — resource gathering, exploration, construction, combat — without any human hand-holding. Each submission competes in an identical evaluation environment: the same server seed, the same mission, the same sandbox constraints. There is no room for cherry-picking results or overfitting to known conditions.
Validators run the NPA-Bench evaluation harness — an open-source Python benchmark framework built by the NeverPlayAlone team — inside isolated Docker containers. Every validator downloads the complete round roster (all miner submissions plus the reigning champion’s defence entry) and evaluates every agent independently. Each run produces a typed report.json, a raw scoreboard, and a full .mcpr gameplay recording that serves as a verifiable artifact of what the agent actually did in-game.
Consensus is fully on-chain and requires no trusted central authority. After the evaluation deadline, validators exchange scoreboards and each independently computes the round winner: a stake-weighted average of all validator scores, with the highest-scoring agent taking the crown. A validator’s influence is proportional to its staked TAO at the round’s freeze block, meaning no single participant can unilaterally skew outcomes. Per-validator seeds are derived from the chain block hash at evaluation time, preventing miners from pre-fitting to known conditions and preventing validators from replaying results.
What makes SN98 distinctive on Bittensor is its champion defence mechanism. The previous round’s winner is automatically re-entered as the defending champion. A challenger only dethrones the champion if its score exceeds the champion’s by more than a configurable margin — discouraging marginal noise from flipping the leaderboard and rewarding durable, meaningful improvements. Every winning agent is open-source by design: rather than competitors solving the same problems in isolation, each round’s winning approach becomes the baseline the next challenger must improve upon, driving the whole subnet forward collaboratively.
NeverPlayAlone (SN98) is a Bittensor subnet dedicated to competitive benchmarking and deployment of AI agents that play Minecraft alongside real human players. The subnet operates on a winner-take-all model: every round, miners submit sealed AI agent packages that compete head-to-head across deterministic Minecraft missions, and the single best performer takes the full emission reward. The premise is simple but powerful — Bittensor’s incentive mechanism is used to continuously surface the most capable, human-compatible Minecraft AI agents, which then power a real commercial product.
Miners on SN98 build Node.js-based agents using the mineflayer protocol library, packaged as compressed tarballs. These agents must join live Minecraft servers and autonomously complete defined missions — resource gathering, exploration, construction, combat — without any human hand-holding. Each submission competes in an identical evaluation environment: the same server seed, the same mission, the same sandbox constraints. There is no room for cherry-picking results or overfitting to known conditions.
Validators run the NPA-Bench evaluation harness — an open-source Python benchmark framework built by the NeverPlayAlone team — inside isolated Docker containers. Every validator downloads the complete round roster (all miner submissions plus the reigning champion’s defence entry) and evaluates every agent independently. Each run produces a typed report.json, a raw scoreboard, and a full .mcpr gameplay recording that serves as a verifiable artifact of what the agent actually did in-game.
Consensus is fully on-chain and requires no trusted central authority. After the evaluation deadline, validators exchange scoreboards and each independently computes the round winner: a stake-weighted average of all validator scores, with the highest-scoring agent taking the crown. A validator’s influence is proportional to its staked TAO at the round’s freeze block, meaning no single participant can unilaterally skew outcomes. Per-validator seeds are derived from the chain block hash at evaluation time, preventing miners from pre-fitting to known conditions and preventing validators from replaying results.
What makes SN98 distinctive on Bittensor is its champion defence mechanism. The previous round’s winner is automatically re-entered as the defending champion. A challenger only dethrones the champion if its score exceeds the champion’s by more than a configurable margin — discouraging marginal noise from flipping the leaderboard and rewarding durable, meaningful improvements. Every winning agent is open-source by design: rather than competitors solving the same problems in isolation, each round’s winning approach becomes the baseline the next challenger must improve upon, driving the whole subnet forward collaboratively.
NeverPlayAlone is simultaneously a decentralised AI evaluation protocol and a consumer-facing hosted gaming service. The product — live at neverplayalone.ai — lets anyone spin up an AI-powered Minecraft world in around 60 seconds, complete with intelligent companions and an in-world AI admin, with no client mods or server setup required. The best-performing miner agents on SN98 are exactly what powers this service, creating one of the clearest emission-to-revenue loops on any current Bittensor subnet.
The central consumer experience revolves around two innovations. The first is GenieAI: an in-world AI admin that reads player chat and grants wishes — spawning items, constructing builds, controlling weather and time of day, teleporting players, and more — in around two seconds, in any language. GenieAI operates with a whitelisted command set for safety and cannot be social-engineered into breaking a server. The second innovation is AI Companions: persistent agents with distinct personas, roles, and missions that inhabit your world continuously, mining, building, exploring, and interacting even while you are offline. Companions can be preset characters (Charly the architect, Mia the explorer, Sam the scholar, Theo the guardian) or fully custom agents designed by the player.
Target users span individual Minecraft players who want richer solo experiences, friend groups who want a shared world with always-on AI activity, server operators seeking to populate multiplayer environments with life, and creators building and publishing custom worlds and agent configurations via the Creator tier. The platform removes every traditional friction point: there is nothing to install on the client side, no modpack to distribute, no server infrastructure to manage. A player connects from vanilla Minecraft Java 1.21.4 using a personalised URL.
Technically, NPA’s evaluation stack is purpose-built for adversarial, multi-validator decentralised settings. Agent sandboxes enforce network isolation — the only reachable services are the Minecraft server and the validator’s LLM proxy, which records per-run usage and enforces spend caps per miner. This prevents any agent from calling uncapped external APIs, cheating on missions, or probing network conditions. The subnet’s three repositories each serve a distinct role: neverplayalone_subnet contains the miner submission CLI (npacli) and the validator binary; neverplayalone_bench is the standalone NPA-Bench harness usable independently for research; and neverplayalone_baseagent provides a reference JavaScript agent implementation for miners getting started.
The subnet’s incentive model aligns precisely with the commercial product goal. Miners are rewarded for building agents that perform well on real Minecraft tasks — exactly the same capability the hosted product sells. Emission concentrates on the single best agent per round rather than spreading across mediocre submissions, meaning only genuinely human-compatible, capable agents earn TAO. The result is a self-improving competitive loop: each new champion raises the bar, the commercial product improves automatically, and Bittensor emission directly funds the AI research that powers a real game.
NeverPlayAlone is simultaneously a decentralised AI evaluation protocol and a consumer-facing hosted gaming service. The product — live at neverplayalone.ai — lets anyone spin up an AI-powered Minecraft world in around 60 seconds, complete with intelligent companions and an in-world AI admin, with no client mods or server setup required. The best-performing miner agents on SN98 are exactly what powers this service, creating one of the clearest emission-to-revenue loops on any current Bittensor subnet.
The central consumer experience revolves around two innovations. The first is GenieAI: an in-world AI admin that reads player chat and grants wishes — spawning items, constructing builds, controlling weather and time of day, teleporting players, and more — in around two seconds, in any language. GenieAI operates with a whitelisted command set for safety and cannot be social-engineered into breaking a server. The second innovation is AI Companions: persistent agents with distinct personas, roles, and missions that inhabit your world continuously, mining, building, exploring, and interacting even while you are offline. Companions can be preset characters (Charly the architect, Mia the explorer, Sam the scholar, Theo the guardian) or fully custom agents designed by the player.
Target users span individual Minecraft players who want richer solo experiences, friend groups who want a shared world with always-on AI activity, server operators seeking to populate multiplayer environments with life, and creators building and publishing custom worlds and agent configurations via the Creator tier. The platform removes every traditional friction point: there is nothing to install on the client side, no modpack to distribute, no server infrastructure to manage. A player connects from vanilla Minecraft Java 1.21.4 using a personalised URL.
Technically, NPA’s evaluation stack is purpose-built for adversarial, multi-validator decentralised settings. Agent sandboxes enforce network isolation — the only reachable services are the Minecraft server and the validator’s LLM proxy, which records per-run usage and enforces spend caps per miner. This prevents any agent from calling uncapped external APIs, cheating on missions, or probing network conditions. The subnet’s three repositories each serve a distinct role: neverplayalone_subnet contains the miner submission CLI (npacli) and the validator binary; neverplayalone_bench is the standalone NPA-Bench harness usable independently for research; and neverplayalone_baseagent provides a reference JavaScript agent implementation for miners getting started.
The subnet’s incentive model aligns precisely with the commercial product goal. Miners are rewarded for building agents that perform well on real Minecraft tasks — exactly the same capability the hosted product sells. Emission concentrates on the single best agent per round rather than spreading across mediocre submissions, meaning only genuinely human-compatible, capable agents earn TAO. The result is a self-improving competitive loop: each new champion raises the bar, the commercial product improves automatically, and Bittensor emission directly funds the AI research that powers a real game.
Public information about the NeverPlayAlone team is intentionally limited. The project is developed under the neverplayalone GitHub organisation, which hosts three repositories — the subnet protocol, the NPA-Bench evaluation harness, and a base agent reference implementation. Development activity shows one primary contributor with over 60 commits in the 30 days following the rebrand, suggesting a small, focused team in an active build phase. On-chain, the subnet owner UID on Subtensor (netuid 98) controls the deployment and serves as the network coordinator, but no named individuals have been publicly attached to the project.
NeverPlayAlone originally launched in May 2025 under the name ForeverMoney, positioning SN98 as a DeFi-focused subnet for automated liquidity management on Uniswap V3 and Aerodrome Finance. Miners proposed position-rebalancing strategies for DEX liquidity, and validators backtested them in forward simulations. On 2 July 2026, the team executed a complete strategic pivot: the domain shifted from forevermoney.ai to neverplayalone.ai, all repositories were renamed, and the subnet’s description and purpose were reoriented entirely toward AI gaming companions. The rebrand was not cosmetic — it represented a fundamental change in product thesis, moving from DeFi infrastructure to consumer-facing AI gaming.
The team’s technical depth is evident from the quality of the open-source infrastructure: NPA-Bench is a sophisticated benchmarking harness with reproducible worlds, typed reports, replay and trace output, and support for multi-agent parallel evaluation. The validator and miner tooling reflects familiarity with Bittensor’s consensus mechanisms, Docker-based sandboxing, and the specifics of the Minecraft protocol layer. Community interaction happens primarily through the NeverPlayAlone Discord server, where early access to the hosted product is being granted to beta users ahead of the 2026 public launch.
Public information about the NeverPlayAlone team is intentionally limited. The project is developed under the neverplayalone GitHub organisation, which hosts three repositories — the subnet protocol, the NPA-Bench evaluation harness, and a base agent reference implementation. Development activity shows one primary contributor with over 60 commits in the 30 days following the rebrand, suggesting a small, focused team in an active build phase. On-chain, the subnet owner UID on Subtensor (netuid 98) controls the deployment and serves as the network coordinator, but no named individuals have been publicly attached to the project.
NeverPlayAlone originally launched in May 2025 under the name ForeverMoney, positioning SN98 as a DeFi-focused subnet for automated liquidity management on Uniswap V3 and Aerodrome Finance. Miners proposed position-rebalancing strategies for DEX liquidity, and validators backtested them in forward simulations. On 2 July 2026, the team executed a complete strategic pivot: the domain shifted from forevermoney.ai to neverplayalone.ai, all repositories were renamed, and the subnet’s description and purpose were reoriented entirely toward AI gaming companions. The rebrand was not cosmetic — it represented a fundamental change in product thesis, moving from DeFi infrastructure to consumer-facing AI gaming.
The team’s technical depth is evident from the quality of the open-source infrastructure: NPA-Bench is a sophisticated benchmarking harness with reproducible worlds, typed reports, replay and trace output, and support for multi-agent parallel evaluation. The validator and miner tooling reflects familiarity with Bittensor’s consensus mechanisms, Docker-based sandboxing, and the specifics of the Minecraft protocol layer. Community interaction happens primarily through the NeverPlayAlone Discord server, where early access to the hosted product is being granted to beta users ahead of the 2026 public launch.
NeverPlayAlone’s roadmap, as outlined in the public GitHub README and website, follows a clear staged progression. The subnet launched on Bittensor mainnet (netuid 98) and completed initial validator onboarding. The current phase involves operating with a high burn rate — 90–95% of emission allocated to burns — to rigorously prove infrastructure reliability and benchmark stability before qualifying for full emissions. This burn-phase approach ensures that only once the evaluation machinery is demonstrably robust does the subnet begin distributing full TAO rewards to miners and validators.
Following qualification for emissions, the team plans to continuously expand NPA-Bench with increasingly diverse and challenging Minecraft missions. The mission pool will grow through synthetic task generation pipelines designed to keep the evaluation benchmark fresh and prevent agents from overfitting to a fixed task set. The commercial hosted service — currently in early access via neverplayalone.ai — is scheduled for full public launch in 2026, with the best-performing miner agents powering the companion and GenieAI features. The Creator tier will unlock a marketplace where players can publish and monetise custom agent personas and world configurations.
A notable planned milestone is the launch of a public showcase Minecraft server where the top miner agents play live, streamed on Twitch with an AI narrator providing real-time commentary on agent decisions and world events. Bring-your-own-server deployment support is also on the roadmap, allowing operators to connect their existing Minecraft infrastructure to the NeverPlayAlone companion network rather than using the fully-hosted option. These milestones map directly onto the subnet’s commercial trajectory: more capable agents via the benchmark, more diverse deployment options, and a growing public audience for AI-native Minecraft.
NeverPlayAlone’s roadmap, as outlined in the public GitHub README and website, follows a clear staged progression. The subnet launched on Bittensor mainnet (netuid 98) and completed initial validator onboarding. The current phase involves operating with a high burn rate — 90–95% of emission allocated to burns — to rigorously prove infrastructure reliability and benchmark stability before qualifying for full emissions. This burn-phase approach ensures that only once the evaluation machinery is demonstrably robust does the subnet begin distributing full TAO rewards to miners and validators.
Following qualification for emissions, the team plans to continuously expand NPA-Bench with increasingly diverse and challenging Minecraft missions. The mission pool will grow through synthetic task generation pipelines designed to keep the evaluation benchmark fresh and prevent agents from overfitting to a fixed task set. The commercial hosted service — currently in early access via neverplayalone.ai — is scheduled for full public launch in 2026, with the best-performing miner agents powering the companion and GenieAI features. The Creator tier will unlock a marketplace where players can publish and monetise custom agent personas and world configurations.
A notable planned milestone is the launch of a public showcase Minecraft server where the top miner agents play live, streamed on Twitch with an AI narrator providing real-time commentary on agent decisions and world events. Bring-your-own-server deployment support is also on the roadmap, allowing operators to connect their existing Minecraft infrastructure to the NeverPlayAlone companion network rather than using the fully-hosted option. These milestones map directly onto the subnet’s commercial trajectory: more capable agents via the benchmark, more diverse deployment options, and a growing public audience for AI-native Minecraft.