Overview of Minetest forks
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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.
List of projects
The following projects are known Minetest forks, which may or may not be active at the moment.
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.
Blocklife
Blocklife was first announced on the Minetest forum on Thu Apr 30, 2015 by gibucsoft. It started with only few noticeable changes to the Minetest 0.4.7 engine and came with a game that included some more mods than Minetst Game. The most interesting feature was the use of two hands that could each be used seperately. On 23th May 2018 gibucsoft anounced to once more start developing. This time the block size might get reduced to a tenth in sidelength. The goal would be to have a more reallistic shaped “round” world.
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 It's no longer maintained.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
An ancient fork. No activity recorded since 2012.
Various forks of the Android version
There are a lot of Android forks. Sadly, there are a lot of low-quality proprietary Minetest forks. Many of them are known to have extremely annoying advertisements (which often make the game near-unplayable) or even in-app-purchases. Those are not part of official Minetest!
The official Android versions can be found here:
Important: Ads, in-app purchases or other 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. Here are some known names in Google Play (because it changes so quickly, this list ls likely 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
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. For most of these, there's no source code provided, there's a proprietary license or no license at all. None of these problems exist in Minetest.
Note we are absolutely not against unofficial forks of Minetest and creating awesome new things with it (that's the whole point of being free software!). But for Android, we simply have not been impressed by the results so far. However, if you think you found a great Minetest fork for Android, please tell us in the forums.
If you want to avoid proprietary forks with annoying anti-features altogether, we 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. :-)
Various forks of the iOS version
Just like with Android, we also had people forking Minetest for iOS. The similar problems apply here.
Here's a list (we can't recommend any of these):
- Buildcraft
- Worldcraft 2
- Worldcraft Pocket Edition
- Exploration
- FreeCraft (No iTunes Store link at the moment)
None of these are free software either. Buildcraft even forces you to perform an in-app purchases to make its ads go away.