Minetest revisited

[GreyGeek]

The free version of Minecraft is called Minetest. I reviewed it 6 years ago on this forum and said it wasn't ready for prime time. IT IS NOW!

The 0.4.16 version and many mods are in the Bionic repository, and the repositories of previous versions of Kubuntu as well.

The latest release is 0.4.17. There are improvements which make installing 0.4.16 first and then upgrading to 0.4.17 problematic. So, if you want to try it with the latest 0.4.17 version then use this PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:minetestdevs/stable
sudo apt-get update

It will put 0.4.17 in the repository. Install it and ALL of the remaining mods listed in the repository. There are other mods available on the web. The home page is: https://www.minetest.net/ A tutorial and many mods, maps, dev tools and other resources are given at https://www.minetest.net/customize/

Minetest is written in C++, uses Lua scripts, and is VERY fast. It also runs my CPU about 20C cooler than the Java Minecraft version on my laptop. Ditto for the GPU. While it is vastly improved over the Minetest I tested 6 years ago, and in many visual aspects appears to match Minecraft, there are technical visual details which are not up to Minecraft's level of presentation and play behavior. Many of its objects (plants, torches, etc) which are difficult to render in cubes, appear as four sided "X"'s, which takes away from the game's aesthetic quality. If you install the animal mods they look like cheap cartoon characters, with some exceptions. However, those defects are not game killing. Where Minetest really shines far above Minecraft is in the quality of mods which contribute home fixtures and furnishings, bridges, roads and street lamps, For people who are not into PVP and fighting mobs but enjoy building homes, cars, planes, highrises, mansions, with what appear to be real doors of all types that work without "redstone" circuitry Minetest is a joy. However, to make complex "electrical" devices Minetest has a mod called mesecons which adds electrical wiring, switches, control boxes, etc., to the game. Minetest's main executable comes with 15 built in mods, called subgame mods. These cannot be deactivated from the game menu.

The mobs in Minetest, if you add the "Mobs_redo" mob, aren't to be trifled with. They are very aggressive and deadly.

Here is the Minetest game Menu:

On it you have access to all the mods, for activating or deactivating, and you can deactivate one or more components in a mod without affecting the other components. Games settings are made here also. What you cannot do from this menu is exit to the OS. That option is presented when you hit the ESC key will running the game, along with the Menu option.

Here is what the game looks like:

That crafting table + Inventory is the result of another mod. Without it the crafting table looks more like Minecraft's.

Here are the mods I installed:


In Minecraft you can do "gamemode spectator" to become invisible and be able to pass through blocks with impunity. In Minetest you can strike the K key to enable move_free, which allows you the same ability, except that you can interact with the environment by adding or removing blocks, etc... To fully activate all features and become an "admin" you can use "/grantme all". This is how the K key, flying and other features that admins can do are activated. Minecraft has an anvil which is used to repair tools. Minetest has an anvil and hammer. You place your tool on the anvil and hit it with the hammer to repair it. With the admin features active there is an option on the crafting panel called "Refill". Place your nearly exhausted tool on it and it is restored to 100%.

In Minecraft you can jump into water from any height and not be injured. In Minetest jumping into water can hurt you if you jump from too high up, just like in real life.

After almost ten years playing with Minecraft I find myself firing up Minetest. It's faster, cooler, looks close enough to Minecraft in most respects, and once you adjust to peculiarities just as much fun. Without the admin feature and the monster mods being added children old enough to use the keyboard and mouse would enjoy playing Minecraft, especially if they like to be builders. There is a mod called "instabuild" that offers "kits" to build a farm, hut, small house, house, large house and a mansion. They offer a great starting point for polishing up the building.

I'll probably post more about Minetest, but I'll finish this post off by saying that Minetest is a now a valid replacement for Minecraft, especially since Microsoft is slowing strangling Minecraft by cutting off its Java air.

[nlsthzn]

I got myself a copy of Minecraft back in the day before it was even properly out. I enjoyed the heck out of it for a day and cumulative since then perhaps played another 3 hours. Not sure why I just get bored so quickly. I then tried out Minetest and I was impressed at the differences between it and Minecraft. Both have some interesting mechanics. I mucked around in Minetest for perhaps two hours on a Ubuntu Local Community server. Perhaps to dust of the Java, install a PPA (or two) and give 'em both another go.

[MoonRise]

Are "Texture Packs" similar and easy to port over? (if they have such a thing)

[GreyGeek]

Are "Texture Packs" similar and easy to port over? (if they have such a thing)

They do are, and some of them are from packs familiar to Minecrafter's. All you have to do is create the directory ~/.minetest/textures and then unzip the zip file into that directory. Then, rename the resulting directory by removing the "-master" ending, which is also what you have to do with the mod file subdirectory when installing mod zip files.

Also, I noticed that when one installs all of the minetest apps in the repository, including the mod apps, that they are stored in /usr/share/games/minetest/mods/. I installed, IIRC, 15 mods from the repository. The 3d_armor mod was broken and I disabled it. However, when I installed a more recent "minetest-3d_armor" mod it took over and the minetest game ignored the original mod. Every mod I put into the ~/.minetest/mods directory overrode identical mods in the /usr/share/games/minetesst/mods directory.

$ [B]ls ~/.minetest/mods[/B]
anvil        farming     item_drop           mob_horse     mobs_redo          warps
datastorage  hopper      mesecons            mobs_animal   pipeworks
digilines    instabuild  minetest-3d_armor   mobs_monster  techpack
drawers      intllib     Minetest-WorldEdit  mobs_npc      unified_inventory

$ [B]ls ~/.minetest/mods/Minetest-WorldEdit[/B]
 ChatCommands.md   modpack.txt   worldedit           worldedit_commands
 config.ld         README.md    'WorldEdit API.md'   worldedit_gui
 LICENSE.txt       Tutorial.md   worldedit_brush     worldedit_shortcommands
$

The worldedit_brush is broken and must be disabled or the game abends with an error telling you about it. Individual components of a mod, or the entire mod itself, can be disabled from the "Configuration" menu of the Menu screen.


I installed the polygonia_128 and polygonia_256px and now use the 256px version. Very nice. Didn't notice any lag due to the higher texture pack usage. I'm still averaging 15-20C cooler on both my CPU and GPU.

All is not rosy, however, as I will share in a future post.

[GreyGeek]

If you want unleash your creative juices in order to landscape and build magnificent structures, houses, highways, lighting systems, or what ever, without bothering to mine ore, smelt, or craft, or being griefed by mobs, then minetest is your ticket. You can add the farming mod, the building kit, and many more listed under "Building" and "Transport" at https://www.minetest.net/customize/

IF, however, you want to battle mobs, build devices using something like redstone, make an autofurnace or automatic sorting storage facility, etc., the minetest may not be your cup of tea. Let me explain comparing an autofurnace in Minecraft with a version of the same in minetest. Here is a simple Minecraft autofurnace:

Notice that it has two chests, one for coal and one for ores, connected to the furnace using hoppers. Coal on the left and ores on top. The furnace is setting on a hopper which points to a chest setting underneath it. That's it. No redstone. Nothing fancy. When the furnace fuel slot gets full the hopper stops delivering coal to it. When the ore slot gets fulll its hopper stops delivering more ore. As smelted ore is generated it is immediately transported by the bottom hopper into the chest below. When that chest gets full the entire process stops until the ingots are moved to another location. If the coal chest runs out of coal or the ore chest runs out of ore then the process stops. This simple furnace can be expanded using a dozen chests which has a rail running across their top. A rail cart with a chest carries ore or coal to each hopper and the process is as many times faster as there are furnaces linked together to smelt ore. Cubfan135 created an automatic smelter that contained about 288 furnaces and can smelt two stacks a second.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wz1BNINJwQ
There is NO WAY that anything like that autofurnace could be crafted in minetest.

Compare that with my attempt to make an automatic furnace in minetest.

I first tried the Minecraft method. Immediately I found out that a mintest hopper won't suck coal or ore out of a chest setting on top of it. Putting ore or coal directly into the hopper so it would transport it into the furnace also failed. Was the hopper mod broken? Logs didn't say so. It apparently needed "activation" by a mesecon conductor (a type of redstone) or a digilines conductor (also a type of redstone). But first I tried a lever. What? I can only put a lever on a vertical surface? Didn't matter. Attached to the chest or the hopper neither would "activate", even with the "split stacks" option. Further, the hopper required a Hopper chute to connect to a block. Connecting the hopper chute to the furnace and then the hopper to the chute didn't work either. They needed "activation" and neither a lever or a button would work. So, to force a chest to give up its contents requires a "filter/injector". In the minetest graphic those are the cubes with the blue arrows on them. Lining up the arrows to point to the furnace is an exercise in near futility. After many tries from many positions one which worked was found. Glass pipes were added to connect the filter/injector (closest one) with the back of the furnace. Glass pipes connected the filter/injector, connected to the coal chest (farthest), to the bottom of the furnace. Then a filter/ejector was placed to the side of the furnace to direct ingots to the chest with the help of more Glass pipes. The filter/injectors needed to be activated with mesecon or digiline "wires". Mesecons has one wire which run along surfaces and a second one which stands up from a surface. None can be placed like redstone can, down into holes, up the sides of blocks and over their tops, or be used with half-slab for vertical conduction of the signal.

AND, I could not find a way to create a signal generator. Minetest doesn't have a repeater or comparator, but it has a mesecon torch. There might be a way, but I haven't found it so far. Maybe something can be made with the Boolean digital circuitry? Anyway, I used the only signal generator I could find, a "Blinky flower", which blinks every 5 seconds (settable from 3 to 15 seconds). My furnace began smelting! When the furnace fuel slot filled up the coal injector continued to inject coal into the pipe, which promptly popped out of the pipe near the point marked by "4" and fell onto the floor as a dropped object. I installed a special pipe called a "Vacuum pipe", the mouth of which is marked by a "1", to suck up the coal laying on the floor and return it to the coal chest. What a crazy work-around! But, the autofurnance would smelt until the ore was converted to ignots and the coal would flow around the circuit continually, whether smelting was going on or not, as long as there was coal in the chest.

Basically, minetest is an exercise in installing mods to do what you want to do. They are, however, its Achilles heel. There may be standards related to developing mods but from what I've seen few mod developers seem to follow them or even understand what their purposes are, if they exist. I have yet to have a mod refuse to load because it didn't match the minetest version. Minetest 4.17 apparently is significantly different from 4.16 and its predecessors. Even so, I could install a mod from 2012 without complaint, and no guarantee that it would work.

Many mods are developed to a rudimentary level and then the developer responds to requests for improvements with "I don't know how to do that", leaving the 3d_armor, for example, unable to deteriorate when the wearer is attacked by a weapon or an animal, making the wearer invincible. If the mobs can't hurt you it's like running in creative, they don't really exist. Several mods require other mods to be installed before they can be installed. WorldEdit, is one such requirement for several mods. So is initlib, mobf and svin. Mobf was last updated in 2011. WorldEdit's brush tool is broken and has to be disabled. Several mods crashed the game, leaving behind an error log.

Mods can be easily added or removed in minetest but there is one extra step. Why? I don't know. Seems superfluous. In Minecraft one must install forge or lightloder to be able to install mods. Then it is simple matter to unzip the jar file and drop it into the /home/<username>/.minecraft/mods/versionnumber/ folder. As I explained before, in minetest one unzips the foler in the ~/.minetest/mods folder and then renames the resulting folder by removing the "master" part of the name. Forge or liteloader is not needed.

RIght now, with 15 mods installed, my minetest game runs very nicely and does crash. It's going to be interesting watching the game, especially the mods, improve as time goes on. I'll be watching and playing.

[GreyGeek]

As an experiment I deleted all the mod packs that I had installed from the repository. Previously I had used the aforementioned PPA to install 0.4.17.1. I did not remove the .4.17 minetest, just the old mod packs that were in the default BIonic repository.

Minetest ran just as normal without those mod packs, because it was using the mod packs I installed in my local ~/.minetest/mods folder. Ditto for the texture pack.

The minetest-3d_armor mod Diamond armor began taking damage when I was down at -186 blocks mining for ore, so it now works OK. Without armor a single fireball from a mob at nearly the same location took all but 1 1/2 hearts so I beat a hasty retreat. With the armor it caused only 1/2 heart damage. Spiders give silk.

I also changed up the automatic furnace to account for the possible over flow of ores. I did this by putting a sorting vacuum glass pipe at the location shown in the images below. I set the blue section to pass only coal to the coal chest and the yellow section to pass everything else, i.e., other possible ores. It works nicely. Now, when I have several ores in the ores chest and it calls up a a gold ore while iron ore is in the furnace the gold ore kicked out is vacuumed up and sorted into the ore chest for recycling.

You can see the T-section with the blue, yellow and red sections. The red and yellow are set to pass everything. The blue section passes only coal.



So now, what ever gets kicked out to the floor is vacuumed up and recycled to the proper chest.

[MoonRise]

Nice. I played around with the Repos version. Was nice. I like high res Texture Packs so I'll look further into.

[GreyGeek]

Minetest revisited

I was wrong. It turns out that one CAN make a simple automatic furnace in minetest. My hopper mod was too old for 0.4.17. When I replaced it with a Hopper mod made for 0.4.17 I got the following:


It smelts lumps of ore at 1 per 3 seconds.

In minetest mining blocks (called "nodes") of ore with a pick axe converts them to lumps of ore. To convert the lumps of ore to metal ingots one must use the furnace. The minetest furnace is about twice as fast as the Minecraft furnace.

This evening I went hog wild and installed about every mod I could find. It was easy to do.
On the following website I activated the "All Mods" link: https://minetest-mods.rubenwardy.com/mods/ which put all the mods on a single page.

I picked 60-70 mods that looked good and on each one I left-clicked on the "Download" link and on the dialog that opened I chose to open it with "Open with: Ark". On the Ark "Extract" menu for the first mod I left clicked on the down arrow and navigated to /home/jerry/.minetest/mods and unzipped the zip file right into the mods directory. I had Dolphin open on that directory and I immediately renamed it by removing the "-master" part of the name. On a few I had to remove "minetest-" from the front of the name. To know what to do one can look at the mod.conf file inside the mod's subdirectory and it will have "name=somename" in it. "somename" will be what the folder name should be like.

On subsequent mods it was simple to left click on its "Download" link, open with Ark, use the Extract menu option and choose the "/home/jerry/.minetest/mods" preset in the drop down list. Then edit the directory to remove "-master", and sometimes "minetest-".

With over sixty mods installed minetest took about 15-30 seconds to load up, compared to less than 10 with only 21 mods installed. The following mods threw errors: irfurn, display_screen, buildtest, lights, ts_doors, waffles. And as I disabled them I continued to get lockups and crashes. At this point I don't know if the problem is in those specific mods or interactions with others of the 60+ mods. I removed them all except the 21 I had installed previously, which restored stability, and then did the auto furnace test, which works, as the image above shows. Tomorrow I plan to add the mods one or two at a time and test to see where the instability is coming from.

I know that the lights, ts_doors, waffles and some other mods I had loaded do work because a recent videos by Richard Jeffries demonstrated them all. So my problem is either one of being too old (not written for 0.4.17) or using the wrong generation map. I use v7. IIRC, Jefferies uses v6. BTW, those Jeffries videos show a level of development of homes and funishings where are way beyond what can be done with Minecraft. Chairs that look like chairs, and not steps, that you can actually set in, kitchen appliances that look like those appliances and not simply boxes with simplistic faces. Vehicles you can set in and drive.

Minetest has reached a level of sophistication in creating homes & their interiors that is beyond what Minecraft can do and minetest is ready to give Java Minecraft users a better experience using lots of mods that don't need Forge or liteloader to install, and it runs light lightening!

After I get a set of stable mods that include all of the mesecons and extensions I plan to experiment with creating replacements for Minecraft's redstone objects: comparators, repeaters, torches, etc. Mesecons actually has boolean logic blocks that include "And", "Or", XOr", "Nor", "Nand", a Real Time Clock (RTC) and some others. So, it looks like I'll be able to do the same things but with a slightly different learning curve.

[GreyGeek]

A very interesting tutorial on how you can make your own mod in minetest:
https://dev.minetest.net/Modding_Intro

Or, using that as an example, how to modify other mods by adding or removing lua code, images, etc... which add, remove or change settings.

And the Complete Mintest Modding Tutorial: https://rubenwardy.com/minetest_modd.../en/index.html

[GreyGeek]

I decided to try out my 0.4.17.1 version of minetest on line. I selected LinuxGaming2 because it is family friendly PVP is blocked and swords and bows are not in the inventory. That online server focuses on building and with the mods available to minetest the buildings already present are very nice. When you first spawn you have nothing in your inventory. Nearby are bright yellow "phone booths" that are actually teleporters. A msg appears when you walk in that explains how to use it. When you punch the back of the phone booth it refreshes the list of zones and a dialog pops up which presents each zone with a button that has a description on it. Those marked "public lands" allow you to build and and "/sethome", your new spawn point. IF you don't respawn at that point when you log in you can issue "/home" and you will be teleported there.

I teleported to a public land and stepping out of the teleporter I noticed buildings all around. I saw through a clearing some water and an island (or peninsule?) with trees and no apparent buildings. Unlike the locations with buildings I could actually mine dirt and stone, and chop trees for resources. If you can't do that at any particular place it is protect by the owner and you'll have to move on and find an unoccupied/owned location.

Here is what the connection dialog for ownline servers looks like:



The server I logged into has a star next to it, which indicates that I have successfully logged into it. Logged in servers will populate the top of the list. You can use the search function to find servers that range from the protected environment of LinuxGaming2 (great for my grandson) to a wild-west format that will probably take you many times to finally survive to a point where you can build your own fortress and accumlate enough resources to build weapons and defenses.