VoxeLibre the free and open source Minecraft-like game available via Luanti (formerly Minetest), just had another big release made available. The new v0.89 brings lots of improvements to gameplay and performance.
A game that likely needs no real introduction here. You know the drill. It's an open world survival sandbox game. Do whatever you want in it. Unlike Minecraft though, this is free and open source.
Some of what's new and improved includes:
- Improved signs with partial UTF-8 support, sign cleaning and more.
- The reworked item frames, including invisible ones for creative mode, can now be placed on floors, ceilings, walls, etc.
- Maps can now be zoomed-out on the cartography table.
- The structure generation is more deterministic, making it easier to share your experience with others when you find great world seeds.
- Multiple performance improvements to make the game smoother.
- Mob spawning is now more reliable and efficient.
- You can now sit on stairs, slabs and blocks from mods supporting it. Plus commands to sit and lay anywhere.
- The hollow logs now have a ladder variant, allowing players to climb through them.
- Multiple textures have been improved.
- More sounds have been added for a more immersive gameplay.
- Dropped kelp no longer plagues the waters.
- Knockback and critical hits got fixed.
Pictured - VoxeLibre 0.89
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Turkeysteaks 5 hours ago
I played this many years ago, I think it came with some distro at the time. It was cool enough then, but I might actually revisit it - not as much a fan of minecraft these days but it sounds like there's so many cool actual new ideas and QoL features in VoxelLibre to try out. Is there any multiplayer yet?
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My kids play this in multiplayer all the time. They particularly like some CTF mod where you have a few minutes to build a base around your flag before the round starts.
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Is there any multiplayer yet?
Yes, it had multiplayer since its inception, thanks to Luanti (formerly Minetest) having this feature. There's also the VoxeLibre Skyblock mod (https://content.luanti.org/packages/ancientmariner/vl_skyblock/) for people who want to build the world, where the recently added hammer is very helpful. :)
Fun twist: yesterday I updated my old tutorial "Compiling Luanti on the Raspberry Pi OS" and of course I had to actually compile it to see if it works. To make it hard, I used my old(er) Raspberry Pi 3B+ with 1GB RAM and ran a server on it.
Years ago, there was no way you could do multiplayer with someone else with only 1GB RAM (a few minutes would be fine, then it would just freeze), but now the RAM usage stayed below 700MB with 2 players for an hour - me on PC, and another player on a phone (multi-platform is possible). The engine (Luanti) is now much better, and VoxeLibre also got plenty of improvements under the hood to keep resource usage low. That was the biggest surprise for me in quite a while. My tutorial recommends at least 4GB RAM, but I would have to actually check that with more people, because this test took me by surprise, big time.
I'll try a server on a Raspberry Pi 5B, since that's faster, but even the old 3B+ was reasonable. Where the old Pi struggles, it's generating the chunks of the world while flying around fast. Running a server like this from a microSD card is obviously not the best idea, but it was surprisingly playable, with some minor lag when moving around and playing normally.
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There's also the VoxeLibre Skyblock mod (https://content.luanti.org/packages/ancientmariner/vl_skyblock/) for people who want to build the world, where the recently added hammer is very helpful. :)
The Skyblock mod is good, but hasn't got much to it yet. I'm hoping they get around to adding the other biome islands and such to make it the full experience.
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