VoxeLibre (formerly MineClone2) v0.87 released moving away from Minecraft

Will it ever get proper PLAYER documentation? Like what to do early, mid, late game? How to get X, Y, Z resource? You know, stuff that kids want to know when playing.

I've been looking forward to seeing this - must update it on my Steam Deck soon! Regardless of what anyone thinks of the new name, I'm curious about what they'll be doing in the future, now that they've made the break from the old one.

Will it ever get proper PLAYER documentation? Like what to do early, mid, late game? How to get X, Y, Z resource? You know, stuff that kids want to know when playing.

There's a basic version of that on the Minetest wiki, though it's still under the old "MineClone 2" name right now.

Sad. First an awful rename, now moving away from the original mission of the mod.

Will it ever get proper PLAYER documentation? Like what to do early, mid, late game? How to get X, Y, Z resource? You know, stuff that kids want to know when playing.

There's a basic version of that on the Minetest wiki, though it's still under the old "MineClone 2" name right now.

Thanks, I know that one, but it's, well, better than nothing, but just barely. I've spent in-game days (well, nights, really) holed up in a shed waiting for night to pass, because there was nothing else to do except go out and die because there's a dozen archers, several spiders and an exploding enemy or three.
Much, much later I learned that if you're lucky you can find sheep and if you're luckier still you can find a smidge of iron to craft shears and THEN make a bed. Maybe, I don't know, never found sheep.


Last edited by blindcoder on 28 May 2024 at 7:25 pm UTC

Will it ever get proper PLAYER documentation? Like what to do early, mid, late game? How to get X, Y, Z resource? You know, stuff that kids want to know when playing.

There's a basic version of that on the Minetest wiki, though it's still under the old "MineClone 2" name right now.

Thanks, I know that one, but it's, well, better than nothing, but just barely. I've spent in-game days (well, nights, really) holed up in a shed waiting for night to pass, because there was nothing else to do except go out and die because there's a dozen archers, several spiders and an exploding enemy or three.
Much, much later I learned that if you're lucky you can find sheep and if you're luckier still you can find a smidge of iron to craft shears and THEN make a bed. Maybe, I don't know, never found sheep.

Sounds like vanilla Minecraft TBH :)

In Minecraft, you can also collect spider silk and assemble it to craft wool, that you can then use for the bed. Don't forget to get some coal for torches, mobs spawn in the dark. If you don't have the resources for a bed, you can spend night time digging for ore, crafting/smelting, etc.

Of course, there is a bit of joy in figuring that out for yourself. I remember my first few nights in Minecraft, they were very rough, spent waiting for daylight in a hole somewhere (that was more than 15 years ago).

Regarding MineClone diverging from Minecraft, I can understand, some things were hard to achieve with the Minetest engine, and not every Minecraft mechanic is worth emulating, IMHO. That said, it was an interesting stress-test for the engine, and I think it drove some of its development. Curious to see where this leads.

Will it ever get proper PLAYER documentation? Like what to do early, mid, late game? How to get X, Y, Z resource? You know, stuff that kids want to know when playing.

Since the game was focused on offering the same experience Minecraft had, our little help system (the "?" icon in the player inventory) mostly focused on the details that are particular to the engine it's built upon. That means the Minecraft wiki largely applies to our game, and many "first day" tutorials about Minecraft work just the same.

Now that we're getting some differences, we have a good reason to be more specific. I guess I'll have to try to overhaul our help, so our developers can spend their time on code. For a while I was split on having this info on our website or in the game, but offline help is always better.

Now the game is a sandbox, so more than the early game info would probably be a bit prescriptive. Everyone shapes up their favourite way to play the game, and trying to guide people in specific directions might be entirely pointless. A great change in the new release is that our mob spawning now enabled proper hostile mob farms - those "classic" vertical drop shafts with a square spawn area and water trenches to push the mobs down. Maybe our help could mention some mob farm ideas, but we'll see when we get there.

Sad. First an awful rename, now moving away from the original mission of the mod.

VoxeLibre is a game (not mod) based on the Minetest engine. We accept the fact that some people don't like the new name, but not only the previous one was terrible, it also stated that we were a clone - which was only partially true. We had a period of community suggestions for a new name, after which our active community members voted, and the current one won by a wide margin.

Even if we lived in a world where companies don't sue, trying to replicate Minecraft entirely is not possible with the engine because it simply does various things differently. But since in this world the risk of having legal issues with the owners of Minecraft is real (search for Minecraft in the DMCAs, we wanted to make sure we protect the game by making sure we avoid the sensitive parts of the game that could get us in trouble.

The original mission is still, and remains, to offer a fun game inspired by Minecraft - now with various differences. Mods for Minecraft have been extremely popular for a long time, and the base gameplay can still be experienced even with additional content. So there's no need to worry about how the game will look like in the future because the additions are complementary.

I've spent in-game days (well, nights, really) holed up in a shed waiting for night to pass, because there was nothing else to do except go out and die because there's a dozen archers, several spiders and an exploding enemy or three.
Much, much later I learned that if you're lucky you can find sheep and if you're luckier still you can find a smidge of iron to craft shears and THEN make a bed. Maybe, I don't know, never found sheep.

I had the same problem years ago when I started playing Minecraft. Thanks for bringing this up, it helps reinforcing the point that we need information for players who have never experienced Minecraft or anything similar. I went as far as suggesting the addition of information for job site blocks, so the new players have an idea about what they do. I always thought Minecraft should've done a better job at explaining the in-game stuff, so you don't have to go to the wiki, but it's debatable how much info is actually useful. A lot of people don't read instructions, so it's not easy to add info that doesn't annoy people but is not hard to find either.

Fun fact, your comments here have been noted in our community and we had yet another chat about this topic. I hope it won't take too long until we come up with something helpful for newbies. If you want to join our community and suggest something on this topic, as well as others, we're on Discord and Matrix.

I agree that the name isn't exactly inspiring, nor does it roll off the tongue easily. But I do like the idea of taking a different direction. Not only to ward off potential lawsuits, but also to stop following so closely in the increasingly gimmicky footsteps of Minecraft itself.

I would like to see them emulate waterlogged blocks, though. Building ponds and rivers would be so much more pleasant.

I would like to see them emulate waterlogged blocks, though. Building ponds and rivers would be so much more pleasant.

We've waited for this feature for years. It requires engine support, and it's still in talks. It's hard to influence the priorities of the Minetest team, and we know full well how things go even in our project - volunteers work on what they're interested in. But to give them credit, the Minetest team did work on other important features that our game needed. Some things just take a long time sometimes. If anyone is interested in helping with their long list of Minetest issues (C++), that would be great.

Oh, I think you'll find this interesting: we now have compressed cobblestone. This is very useful on its own, to better manage storage space, and it can also be uncompressed. You can compress 9 cobblestone blocks (3x3 grid) into its "Compressed" variant, then 9 Compressed Cobblestone will become Double Compressed Cobblestone, and so on, up to 8 compressions. But if you ever manage to get an Octuple Compressed Cobblestone block, mining that block will give you some diamonds and netherite scraps.

That said... 9 * 9 * 9 * 9 * 9 * 9 * 9 * 9 = 43046721

But if you prefer avoiding the Nether, at least there's another way to get the ultimate upgrades for your tools and weapons.

I think it's good that they move away from Minecraft, while I believe that more additions for ease of use are neccessary i.e. quick inventory management, smooth and fast movement etc. Otherwise just take what Minecraft did well or what folks would miss.
A lot of stuff Minecraft has and had was good, so there obviously is a lot of potential for cloning, but besides that individual ideal offering a good coherent experience could also serve as a nice foundation for Mods to build on.
If the base game is more fluent I could imagine myself being one of those Mod authors and maybe even with some converted Minecraft friends of mine.

Will it ever get proper PLAYER documentation? Like what to do early, mid, late game? How to get X, Y, Z resource? You know, stuff that kids want to know when playing.

Since the game was focused on offering the same experience Minecraft had, our little help system (the "?" icon in the player inventory) mostly focused on the details that are particular to the engine it's built upon. That means the Minecraft wiki largely applies to our game, and many "first day" tutorials about Minecraft work just the same.

Thank you for this information! THAT is what I'd have needed to know a lot sooner. I've never played Minecraft, ever. And, well, the title bar in the Minetest launcher literally says "It's NOT Minecraft" so when trying to search for Mineclone tutorials, I completely skipped the Minecraft ones, because of course I did.

I'll probably dive back into the game soon then! Much love for all the work!

I have mixed feelings about "moving away from Minecraft". Sure, I can just play Minecraft if I want Minecraft.

Then again, Minetest + VoxeLibre/MineClone so far has provided an alternative that was

a) free (as in beer)
b) performing better on low end hardware
c) staying close to Minecraft content

And this was definitely of value to the existing players. So for now, I am mildly anxious what happens next.

I have mixed feelings about "moving away from Minecraft". Sure, I can just play Minecraft if I want Minecraft.

Then again, Minetest + VoxeLibre/MineClone so far has provided an alternative that was

a) free (as in beer)
b) performing better on low end hardware
c) staying close to Minecraft content

And this was definitely of value to the existing players. So for now, I am mildly anxious what happens next.

i loved it as mineclone, despite i missed better shader-options.

d) runs on android alongside pc

And this was definitely of value to the existing players. So for now, I am mildly anxious what happens next.

Same feelings here. But thankfully there is still Mineclonia on this front, right?

Thank you for this information! THAT is what I'd have needed to know a lot sooner. I've never played Minecraft, ever. And, well, the title bar in the Minetest launcher literally says "It's NOT Minecraft" so when trying to search for Mineclone tutorials, I completely skipped the Minecraft ones, because of course I did.

I'll probably dive back into the game soon then! Much love for all the work!

That quote is "It's not in MC!!1" and it's a tongue in cheek poke at a few of our players who were adamant that we stay strictly with Minecraft features, nothing different. Adding the hamburger to right-click a villager to follow you caused some drama some time ago, but since the engine still doesn't have the technical capability to draw lines, we couldn't implement the leads (and still can't) and someone decided to contribute his idea of adding a new item until we can have leads. There's a mod that does it, but the performance of that is not what the engine could offer, so the majority vote went to adding the hamburger.

The strong reluctance of some people to stay strictly on Minecraft's footsteps also didn't sit well with most of us. Sometimes it's about solving issues so that the players don't struggle. Sometimes we simply wanted to add stuff that made sense without being intrusive to the expected Minecraft gameplay.

Here's 3 tiny differences that are nice and useful:
- we have gold stairs
- our Nether portals are not required to be rectangular, they just need a closed frame of obsidian blocks
- our sugar cane can be placed even diagonally next to water (strange thing for Minecraft to hydrate farms diagonally but not hydrate sugar cane the same way :P)

I have mixed feelings about "moving away from Minecraft". Sure, I can just play Minecraft if I want Minecraft.

Then again, Minetest + VoxeLibre/MineClone so far has provided an alternative [...]

And this was definitely of value to the existing players. So for now, I am mildly anxious what happens next.

We like what Minecraft has to offer and we wanted that experience in a free and open source game that's much easier to mod, and functional on older PCs. It's a lot easier to find people to play with when the requirements are low. So every now and then I spend a few hours playing the game on my 15-year old laptop to see how our performance is doing - it's much easier to catch performance regressions on that.

The base gameplay and existing Minecraft tutorials will still just work, and it's important for us to keep it that way because we like our main source of inspiration. We simply want to expand the scope of the project and make sure that we avoid legal trouble. People who strictly want a Minecraft experience can indeed choose to play that game.

Hey, everyone! :) To those reading this message, we're getting closer to the next release and we would appreciate some help with testing some rather big changes - fixes, polish, code refactoring.

VoxeLibre 0.88 includes work on over 100 issues. They're 75% completed at this point, and a few of the ones left require more thorough testing:

Minecart Update
Download: https://git.minetest.land/teknomunk/MineClone2/archive/minecart-update.zip
Feedback: https://git.minetest.land/VoxeLibre/VoxeLibre/pulls/4213

Improve mob smartness
Download: https://git.minetest.land/kno10/VoxeLibre/archive/leap_of_death.zip
Feedback: https://git.minetest.land/VoxeLibre/VoxeLibre/pulls/4479

Projectile refactor
This needs verification that projectiles (especially arrows/rockets, but other ones too) work at least as good as before, and not worse.
Download: https://git.minetest.land/VoxeLibre/VoxeLibre/archive/projectile-refactor.zip
Feedback: https://git.minetest.land/VoxeLibre/VoxeLibre/pulls/4433

Shield improvements and bugfixes
Download: https://git.minetest.land/VoxeLibre/VoxeLibre/archive/shieldy_shields.zip
Feedback: https://git.minetest.land/VoxeLibre/VoxeLibre/pulls/4582

Both new and old worlds would be good for testing, and of course make sure you make backups of your old worlds, just in case. And since our goal is to support the 2 most recent major Minetest releases (5.8 and 5.9), reports for either/both are useful to us.

Thanks in advance for your help! :)