Minetest

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Minetest is a free software game engine to create various games based on voxel gameplay, inspired by InfiniMiner, Minecraft, and the like. Minetest was originally created by Perttu Ahola (alias “celeron55”).

The basic idea of each game is always the same: The player is thrown into a huge world made out of cubes/blocks. Most of the time, these cubes make the landscape and these blocks can be removed and placed almost entirely freely. Using the collected items, new tools and other items can be crafted. Games in Minetest can, however, be much more complex than this.

A core concept of Minetest is a built-in modding capability, based on the Lua programming language. Mods allow one or more certain aspects of an existing game to be modified. Minetest mods can be as simple as adding a few decorational blocks or very complex by (for example) introducing complex new gameplay concepts or generating a completely different kind of world, and many other things. For the player, using a new mod requires to copy or extract some files into a certain location and pressing some buttons in Minetest's interface.

Minetest can be played alone or online together with multiple players.

Minetest is usually bundled with a simple default game, named “Minetest Game”. Other games for Minetest can be found on ContentDB.

Features

  • A big cube-based world to discover (61840 nodes (cubes) in every dimension)
  • Procedurally generated world
  • Several world generators with many adjustable parameters
  • Extremely high configurability with an advanced settings editor and built-in descriptions, or by using a configuration file
  • Customize the graphics and sounds through texture packs
  • Download games, mods and texture packs from the built-in ContentDB
  • Singleplayer mode and online multiplayer mode
  • Server list
  • Sophisticated modding system using Lua
  • Mods are entirely server-sided. You can join any Minetest server with any mods and start playing, no additional software required
  • Relatively low system requirements

Screenshots

Games

As Minetest is an engine, the actual in-game appearance heavily depends on the actual game being played. This is a selection of some of the games that are available for Minetest. A full list of games can be found on ContentDB

Mods

Mods are installed on top of games by the user to modify an existing game. These screenshots show mods modifying Minetest Game:

There exists several hundred mods, some for Minetest Game and some for other games. The largest list of mods can be found on ContentDB

Main menu

More screenshots

In the Minetest forums, many screenshots are posted by players in several threads:

System requirements

Minetest requires the following:

  • A computer, laptop or Android device
  • Screen
  • Mouse and keyboard/touchscreen (mobile)
  • Speakers (Optional: if you want to play with sound)
  • Graphics

In terms of system resources needed, this varies wildly depending on the game you choose, your view range and your tolerance and desired framerate.

Legal

Minetest is free software, without advertisements and free of charge. It is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1, with artwork generally covered by Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0.

See also