Minetest is an incredibly fun and creative sandbox game that allows players to build and explore their own unique world. The randomly generated environment is full of blocks of different shapes and sizes, and players can use them to create anything from small structures to entire cities. The game also has a variety of tools for digging holes and channels, leveling the ground, and placing objects in the environment. The possibilities are endless and the game is a great way to spend time with friends or just relax and explore. Highly recommended!
Minetest is intended for playing games. In fact, it is an open-source version of Minecraft, a well-known indie game. In this respect, most users acknowledge that this product is a quite perfect imitation of the original. Therefore, it is logical that, just like Minecraft, minetest has open-ended goals, with the additional incentive that you can create your own structures, objects and tools. Besides, most of the interest in this type of game comes from its being both single and multiplayer, which means that you can share your worlds with other users.
Technically speaking, it is excellent that minetest supports a huge playing area. Likewise, it comes with an impressive texture pack. What is more, its engine includes multiple map generators. Yet, you could still install additional generators if you wish. Fortunately, there are also many games you can download from various servers, which include survival and building games.
Despite the similarities mentioned, minetest shows some differences if you compare it with Minecraft. Some users, for instance, claim it is easier to survive in minetest since there are fewer dangerous situations. Besides, even though there are fewer mods available, they are easier to install. There is also a negative opinion about minetest having fewer animations. Finally, it is a shame that you could experience a lag feeling at times.
All in all, it is excellent that there is an open-source version of Minecraft with a friendly community to support it. Regrettably, minetest has the downside of being just an imitation, so it may get somewhat outdated compared with the original at times. Luckily, this product is available for various platforms.
v0.4 [Apr 13, 2013]
Big gameplay changes
- Added third person view
- Removed finite liquid and weather
Smaller gameplay tweaks
- Create bones only when the player's inventory is not empty & remove the bones when emptied
- Made pause menu actually pause singleplayer game and use lower maximum FPS in it
- Prevented placing node when player would be inside new node
- Drop an item instead a stack while sneaking
- Added support for exiting formspecs by doubleclicking outside
Logistic changes
- Made build prefer pkg-config for freetype2 detection
- Added function to deregister a profiler from profiler list
- Made MutexQueue use jsemaphore for signaling
- Added maximum recursion depth to read_json_value
- Made default User-agent follow RFC 2616
- Include system info in the HTTP user agent on Windows
- Added proper client initialization
- Settings: Add no-exception variants of each get method
- Huge overhaul of the entire MapgenParams system
- ServerEnvironment: Remove direct dependency on EmergeManager
- Replace pause, message, and death menus by formspec ones
- Pass arguments by reference, reducing data copies
- Cleaned up client init states by bumping protocol version
- Added support for named threads on Linux, BSD, and Windows (MSVC-only)
- Infered ipv6_server from bind_address; fixed client connect to IN(6)ADDR_ANY
- Fixed all warnings reported by clang
- Removed locks that aren't absolutely required from JThread
- Use narrow_to_wide in gettext instead of operating system dependent conversion function
- Organized builtin into subdirectories
- Switched to "core" namespace internally
- Mapped Irrlicht log level to Minetest's and allowed writing Irrlicht logs to debug file
- Made print() NUL-safe
- Added formspec toolkit and re-factored main-menu to use it
- Reworked dumping functions
- Improved performance by removing some temporary objects
- Added an AppData file
- United node shaders and improved shader performance
- Made players only stay loaded while they're connected
- Added formspec API versioning
- Added support for multipart/form-data to HTTPFetch
- Improved error reporting of LevelDB backend
Visual changes
- Added waypoint HUD element
- Added on-the-fly normal map generation
- Made sun and moon textureable
- Made formspec text-area word-wrap
- Added support for DPI based HUD scaling
- Made debug text adjust it's border to the screensize
- Added download rate to non-HTTP media progress bar
- Added support for interlaced-polarized, top-bottom, and side-by-side 3D screens
- Made pause menu hide before "Shutting down..." message is drawn
- Sorted commands and privileges alphabetically in '/help'
- Improved face shading with and without shaders
- Added support for scalable font and GUI elements
- Made GUITable mouse wheel scrolling faster
Other changes
- Added the option to bind to a specific address
- Made flag strings clear specified flag with 'no' prefix
- Added check to avoid usage of broken LuaJIT < 2.0.0-beta-8
- Lots of new and updated translations
- Improved performance of ABMs by only calcuating object counts once
- Improved win32 file version information
- Documented CMake options in README
- Corrected misleading detached inventory error message
- Added more informative error messages for inventory and item method errors
- Added redis database backend
- Moved the old stuff to doc
- Removed dependency on marshal and many other async changes
- Made item entity stacks merge on the ground and add TTL to item entities
- Updated buildbot scripts and added 64-bit buildbot
- Added support for directly starting a world by name from command line
- Many performance improvements and memory usage reductions
- Added support for Android 2.3 and later
Bug fixes
- Fixed objects being selected behind a node
- Fixed absence of images when compiled with RUN_IN_PLACE=0 (xyz)
- Added option to link to OpenGL ES
- Fixed CMake list parsing in build
- Fixed cutting of multi-line error messages at half of second line in main menu dialog
- Created new instance of mesh every time it's required
- Escaped error messages in error dialog
- Added operating system to user agent
- Prevented auto-rotated nodes from replacing the nodes they were placed on
- Added protection support to auto-rotated nodes
- Set locale properly when built without gettext support
- Fixed Minetest's reliable UDP implementation
- Compare values instead of pointers in Inventory::operator==
- Fixed some errors reported by clang static analyzer (xyz)
- Fixed win32 reading semaphore count not working (broke all queues)
- Prevented player from jumping into nodes from below
- Fixed cURL DLL not getting installed when sound was disabled
- Fixed error on mod download failure
- Fixed use of previously deallocated EmergeManager
- Fixed only half of unreliable queue being handled per step in worst case
- Fixed player textures by adding '-' to list of allowed characters in media filenames
- Fixed texture pack names corrupting mainmenu
- Fixed crash when a error occurred in a globalstep callback
- Fixed a heap-use-after-free in pause menu (xyz)
