Minetest, the open source sandbox game inspired by InfiniMiner & Minecraft has a major new version

I tried Minetest several times, but never heard of Voxelands - I have to check this game, looks nice!

Thanks for turning me on to Voxels, it will make a nice addition to my Linux Install guide for my noob army looking to quickly learn about stuff that interests them on X.

Anyone remember what a hit Blockscape was? Oh wait that didn't happen the devs fled for the mountains, lol... In anycase its nice to have Minetest and Voxel, I wonder how close their codebase is in porting updates since it is a fork.

I follow Minetest development fairly closely and it is frustrating to watch a project that is clearly a Minecraft clone be inhibited by developers who want very badly for it "not to be like Minecraft". So what we're left with is a husk game that has no goals or challenges, and leaves content out in order to appease a group who can never agree on a clear direction for the project. Luckily, they are talented and built a robust Lua API so there are plenty of mods which add things most of us would normally expect from a Minecraft clone. For the uninitiated, Minetest by default does not have mobs, farming/hunger or circuitry(redstone).

But of course, it also has things by default that Minecraft doesn't such as locked chests and much larger world height/depth so don't let me dissuade you from trying it out.

This is the first voxel sandbox game I played. I really liked it, but then I switched to Minecraft. It's a nice game and it was pretty cool playing on modded servers without having to download those mods on your own, you could just join any server.
It was long ago (MC was just updated to version 1.1 back then) so I'm sure this game improved a lot. I didn't play it since then because MC offers pretty much the same experience, except for the modded servers... I will try it again eventually to see how this aspect has improved :D

Yeah, Minetest isn't much of a game as-is and pretty much needs a modpack on top of it to be fun. I myself have played with Carbone NG which adds pretty much all the features I would need in a Minecraft-like. You can find it here.

Minecraft feels so much more polished than any of the clones. Which is sad, because there are some that can sustain massively bigger worlds, higher view distance, more entities and still have a better performance than Minecraft.

Now want Minetest with Vulkan API :D

I play at Minetest since the start "Minetest C55" the game evolve it's cool!


Last edited by Belarrius on 21 May 2016 at 9:58 am UTC

@Liam the game is meant to be modded, you can see this on custom servers. If you check out the public server list and join one of the popular ones you will see the amount of custom stuff in there.


Last edited by on 21 May 2016 at 1:24 pm UTC

Minecraft feels so much more polished than any of the clones. Which is sad, because there are some that can sustain massively bigger worlds, higher view distance, more entities and still have a better performance than Minecraft.

did you look in the public server list? the game is all about modding. Out of the box its basically a barren rev.1 minecraft build.

I've been running Minetest (initially for my sons, but I've been playing it too!) for a few weeks, starting at 0.4.13 and now 0.4.14.

Initially, I wasn't that impressed - the base game is pretty quiet and basic. It wasn't until I starting trawling through the forums that I realized there are a metric ton of mods for the base game. Any initial concerns I had that the mods might conflict have evaporated - I've been running a mix of homedecor_plus, farming_plus, throwing_enhanced and mesecons, on top of a goodly set of mobs and it plays well. The extreme mod-ability of the game also helps me balance it out - my youngest is most interested in building and exploring, but doesn't want to fight wolves or zombies (although slimes appear to be okay).

I would recommend anyone interested look around at the mods before starting a server - some mods will affect the generation of blocks within the world (moreores, moretrees, moreblocks) and you probably want those active at the initial world generation.

You might also want to ensure that jungle and dungeon generation are enabled for your world before you generate it too - check out the possibilities for ~/.minetest/minetest.conf

Oh - and a single minetest server can be accessed from Linux, Windows, MacOSX clients and Android devices, which removes my main complaint against Minecraft - tablets and phones can only play against Pocket Minecraft.

Worth looking at Terasology too, although I haven't tried it myself.

Oh - and a single minetest server can be accessed from Linux, Windows, MacOSX clients and Android devices, which removes my main complaint against Minecraft - tablets and phones can only play against Pocket Minecraft.

AFAIK the PE is becoming more and more similar to the desktop version, and the plan is to eventually merge them. It will take quite some time till we get there, though. It would be nice to play together with PE users, even tho I personally never tried playing the PE for more than a few minutes, because FPS games are IMO terrible on mobile devices. Actually most kinds of games are pretty bad and uncomfortable to play on mobile (except board/puzzle/card games), but that's probably just me.


Last edited by 1mHfoksd1Z on 21 May 2016 at 6:23 pm UTC

I have play Minetest with Android but the performance is poor. Want Minetest with Vulkan :p

The code is open so just start porting it to Vulkan. :P

The code is open so just start porting it to Vulkan. :P

Ahah yeah, i want! xD

There are some really fun mods and subgames for Minetest that are worth trying out. I'm very new at it, but I've found everything easy to install and highly accessible.

So far my favourite subgames are Voxelgarden, which has Viking-esque tech, and Pixture, which really does cool things with the textures. Although being such a n00b, I'm a bit lost and just doing things at random in single-player mode, and yet not confident enough to hop onto a server full of experienced players.

Haven't been able to get Voxelands to run on my system, is it any good?

The code is open so just start porting it to Vulkan. :P

You're going to have to start by porting Irrlicht to Vulkan.


Last edited by GustyGhost on 22 May 2016 at 6:27 pm UTC

Well I tried some mods, I do hope they add in a mod downloader into it as that would certainly simplify it.

Shame though, the subgames I tried didn't work due to missing lua.init or something.