Inspired might be pushing it a bit eh? MineClone2 as the name suggests really is a clone of early Minecraft, although this is free and open source powered by the Minetest game engine. A big new release is out now following the recent Minetest upgrade.
MineClone2 v0.83 "Safe and Sound" is full of new features and honestly it sounds really great. You will find new and updated music, new sound effects, biome coloured foliage and water, mobs can ride minecarts, hoppers can put items in minecarts, new and improved /clearmobs commands, Iron Golems now protect themselves and villagers, various performance improvements, improved translations, lots of bug fixes and the list goes on.
You can see their latest release video below:
Direct Link
Nice to see this great free and open source Minecraft alternative coming along so nicely.
You need Minetest to play it, and then you can download it via the in-game content downloader.
The slowest "modern enough" PC I tested this release on is an older laptop:
- CPU: Core 2 Duo T9550 at 2.66 GHz (dual core)
- RAM: 4 GB DDR2 PC-667
- GPU: ATI Radeon Mobility HD 3470 (OpenGL 3.0) with 256MB dedicated RAM + 512MB from system RAM (on demand)
- SSD: Samsung 850 Pro 256GB
- OS: Linux Mint 21.1 Cinnamon
This laptop gave me around 10-20 FPS a few versions ago - a bit too sluggish for my taste. Now I get 60+, though not all the time. It fluctuates between 20-40 FPS while I fly around the world with the fast privilege, and while it does take some time to load the surrounding chunks, it feels smooth.
I don't know how much the new Minetest 5.7.0 contributed to this experience, but our lead maintainer is still focused on performance improvements and there are some more gains to be scored in the coming releases. :) For now, I got myself some new-old "gaming" hardware. Make sure you give it a try on something old.
Last edited by kneekoo on 21 April 2023 at 1:06 am UTC
MineClone2 is honestly an amazing experience, in many ways I'd say it is a better overall experience than Minecraft itself now is simply due to how unrestricted it is.
Gameplay in terms of content is near enough identical, usually being a couple of Months behind Mojang for new content.
The MineClone2 game is also more reliable, and performance is much better than compared with Minecraft (+ Sodium & Phosphorus for achieving higher performance than the stock game).
Build Height is far larger at 64,000 Blocks in Mineclone2 vs 1024 in Minecraft (Using custom maps but no mods), without custom maps Minecraft is still limited to just over 300 Blocks of total height, so it pales in comparison to MineClone2/MineTest.
The only thing that MineClone2 loses out on is build area, limited to 64,000 blocks, whereas Minecrft goes into the Millions of Blocks, but in all honesty if you need a build area of more than 64 Kilometers you a in the 0.1% of the user base.
I personally see no point in playing stock Minecraft anymore.
If you want to play Minecraft to try it out, give Mineclone2 a spin, you won't regret it!
P.S.
MineClone2 also runs great on a Smartphone too (Cross-Play Capable with PC Players).
I play it often on my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 at 1440p and Performance is AMAZING for a fully fledged PC game on a Phone!
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