The Joy of Minetest!

Hello! Today, we are going to look at this very interesting free and open-source (FOSS) game/engine called Minetest.

In essence, it is a voxel game infrastructure heavily inspired by Minecraft. Originally it was an attempt to reimplement it in C++ by its original author, which quickly evolved into a full scale community project. While the engine itself is written in C++ and uses the Irrlicht backend, games and mods are written in Lua and utilize the facilities provided by Minetest itself, although some functionality is hard-coded.

In no small part thanks to its crescent community, Minetest has quickly grown into an entire array of games and mods. It and its online content is regularly updated. In fact, right as I checked the Online Content browser below, I was met with two content updates, and that was in the span of a day or two!

The good thing about this online content infrastructure, is that one can join a modded server and the client will automatically install these mods for you! This makes for a very seamless and convenient experience.

First Impressions

Upon starting or joining a game, one of the first things you notice about Minetest is the graphics. They certainly feel weird, for anyone who is used to Minecraft. The graphics are rudimentary, especially if you have to tone them down for low end hardware, but they're not too bad either way.

This is immediately compounded once you start moving your character. Movement, in the default game at least, feels janky and somewhat wrong. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it can get a little bothersome sometimes.

If you did not load any mods, get ready to be turned off by the "vanilla experience" offered by the default game, Minetest Game.

The next thing you will notice is that this is a relatively simple world, without much content. It has dungeons, but it does not have monsters. No animals roam the land above. Items don't drop as world objects when you break a block, instead they are instantly counted in your inventory. However, those item objects do exist; for instance, when leaves decay, sometimes they drop sapling items, just in Minecraft. However, you have to click one to pick it up, rather than simply stand near it, which can get jarring.

But there is a very big caveat. You're not supposed to play the 'vanilla' experience here.

Going back to that online content browser from earlier, we can find many interesting mods for Minetest Game, including a technology mod called Technic, an agricultural mod called Farming Redo, biome mods, mods that add animals, monsters, pets, and everything inbetween! There are also small tweaks, such as adding Minecraft-esque item dropping and picking up, and improved item physics. (This last one I helped with the physics in water flow! Note Gustavo6046 is my old alias.)

These mods greatly help increase the depth of the Minetest Game experience.

However, perhaps even more crucially, among the sea of online content, lie many games that have been made by the community for the Minetest engine.

That's right – full on games, with their very own textures, mechanics, mobs!

The MineClone series of games simply seeks to simulate a Minecraft experience in Minetest. And it actually does a pretty good job with what it has so far.

Some others, like NodeCore twist the basic concepts introduced in Minecraft of how asandbox voxel game works. In NodeCore you start not punching trees, but leaves, for sticks you can then stack on top of each other for other basic items.

Whereas others lie in completely new genres altogether!

Subway Miner, for instance, is a Subway Surfers inspired game:

Whereas Little Lady is a cozy puzzle-adventure game where you play as a little ladybug:

In conclusion, Minetest is a great experience, especially in multiplayer with friends, with a wealth of mods and games that keeps expanding thanks to a great and growing community. If one experience is rough around the edges, there's always a newer, better one out there to try out, with its own little mods to stack on top :)