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.

Freeminer

Freeminer is a fork of Minetest version 0.4.8.

The project goals are 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]

Voxelands

Voxelands was started 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.

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. However, the goal of backwards compatibility may be dropped in the future.

Inactive projects

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

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.