Overview of Minetest forks

A software is said to be a fork if it is a derivation of a copy of another software; that is, if it is based on its source code and other related data. Minetest has seen some forks in its history. This article gives an overview of some of the known forks of Minetest.

What is a Minetest fork?

As said, above, a fork is another copy of software that is edited. For Minetest, it is the same. Except a few mods put together is not called a fork, that would be a modpack. A fork is a Core engine change(s) that are not official and will not be released as a version of Minetest unless submitted and accepted in a pull request.

Active projects

The following projects are known to be actively developed.

Voxelands

Voxelands was started under the name “Minetest Classic” on the 15th of April 2013 (date of earliest recorded commit) by darkrose as a fork of the latest stable release of the 0.3 series of Minetest-c55 (“Minetest-c55” was the earlier name of Minetest).

The fork was motivated by a dissatisfaction of Minetest becoming more and more a game engine rather than a game. Voxelands developers also claim that with the start of 0.4 series (and the introduction of the Lua modding API), Minetest has decreased in performance, which is another key motivation for Voxelands. Voxelands is incompatible with Minetest and now quite different.

Key goals of Voxelands are keeping the game at least as performant as the Minetest-c55 0.3 series, adding new content, maintaining balanced gameplay with a focus of in-world functionality, backporting bugfixes and some features from the 0.4 series and maintaining backwards compatibility to the 0.3 series at the network protocol level.

Various forks of the Android version

Android users beware: In Google Play (Google's repository for Android software), there are a lot of low-quality proprietary Minetest forks. Many of them are known to have extremely annoying advertisements or even in-app-purchases. While a few forks might be legitimate and not ad-infested, we have not been impressed by the results so far. But if you think you found a great Minetest fork for Android, please tell us in the forums.

Important: Ads, in-app purchases or other fishy anti-features are not, and will never be part of Minetest! If you see ads, double-check if you have really installed Minetest, and not something else Minetest is a community-driven free software project and we are way too proud of ourselves to ever need something like ads or in-app-purchases. :D

Many of these Minetest forks come and go rather quickly. To give you some orientation, here are some known names in Google Play (remember this list is likely to be outdated and incomplete):

• Worldcraft: Exploration Lite
• WorldCraft 2 : Pocket Edition
• PixelCraft — 3D Survival!
• ► MultiCraft ― Free Miner!
• Crazy Craft on Castle World PE
• MultiCraft - Minetest France
• Cartoon Craft: Castle World PE
• Voxel Craft : Castle Build PE
• World Craft 3D
• Squeake Craft PLUS

Discussion thread.

Not much is known about these forks so far (feel free to edit this wiki page!). But we do know all these forks are illegetimate proprietary forks and/or they contain anti-features such as ads. There's no source code provided, there's a proprietary license or no license at all. Minetest does not have any of these flaws.

If you want to avoid proprietary forks with annoying anti-features altogether, we highly recommend you start to use F-Droid instead of Google Play. F-Droid software is a repository maintained by free software zealots like us in which fishy proprietary software is not allowed in the first place. :-)

Here you find the official Android versions of Minetest:

• Minetest on F-Droid
• Minetest on Google Play

Various forks of the iOS version

Just like with Android, we also had people forking Minetest for iOS. The similar problems apply here.

• Buildcraft
• Worldcraft 2
• Worldcraft Pocket Edition
• Exploration

None of these are free software either. Buildcraft even forces you to perform an in-app purchases to make its ads go away.

Note there's nothing like F-Droid for iOS. :-(

Discussion thread.

Inactive projects

There are also forks of Minetest which eventually withered and died. These projects are not actively developed anymore.

Freeminer

Freeminer is a fork of Minetest version 0.4.8. It's no longer maintained.

The project goals have been vaguely described as something along the lines of “To create a fun and playable game” and it is unclear what has motivated the fork. A list of changes compared to Minetest was published: [1]

Freeminer is also available for Android, but it's no longer maintained either.

Minetest-delta

Minetest-delta was a fork of Minetest, maintained in mid-2011, with the goal of adding more experimental features to Minetest. Some contributions like papyrus, cacti and jungles have since been merged in Minetest.

Minetest-M13

No activity recorded since 2012.