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Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s just convention which axis represents up. Typically you don’t see the axis labels rearranged like in the OP but instead coordinate systems described as y-up or z-up. Similarly left and right handed.
Well, it's about the order. In vanilla Minecraft client you see height as the second coordinate out of the three.
Cool project. You could definitely do more with this with more modern Minecraft tech like custom models and physics engines.
> cool creatures that walk around and look like cheetahs or whatever Once you have the actual behavior, everything else is just animation. Maybe you could evolve some keyframes fitting particular criteria?
I would put "Minecraft" somewhere in the title.
> The locations of the creatures are output in (x, z, y) format (don't ask me why the Minecraft devs did this) It's the same in Unity and three.js. Probably so the first two coordinates mark axis on the plane the player is looking at (width and height; until they move), with the third one being "depth"? Instead of the third one being height as one might expect.
Minecraft uses (x,y,z), and uses the 'y' coordinate for height (not 'z'). This is very common for exactly the reasons you outline.
Also, flipping two coordinates changes the handedness of the system. OpenGL uses left-handed coordinates while Minecraft uses right-handed. I'm not sure this is relevant here, it should be an internal conversion.
> cool creatures that walk around and look like cheetahs or whatever Once you have the actual behavior, everything else is just animation. Maybe you could evolve some keyframes fitting particular criteria?
Creative idea - I'll think about this.