After 10 yrs, Minecraft and I are parting ways

[GreyGeek]

Even after Minecraft was purchased from Mojang several years ago the Java version continued to work as it always has.
However, Microsoft has begun migrating accounts from Mojang to Itself. Also, unfortunately, Microsoft seems to think that Minecraft will work better if it knows my account password, i.e., the keys to the kingdom. Why should I have to give Microsoft direct access to everything on my system? I shouldn't. Minecraft has worked well for me for nearly 10 years without requiring my account password. Ergo, what I feared would happen when Microsoft takes over is happening now.

It has been a nice run and gave me and my grandsons many wonderful hours playing. But, sadly, Microsoft thinks I have to give them control of my computer if I want to continue to play Minecraft. They've thought wrong.

I closed my MC 17.1 map a few minutes ago and now I am going to purge MC from my system and add Microsoft's domain names to my hosts file so further contacts from those domains get shuffled into the infinite bit bucket.

[Bings]

Have you seen Minetest https://www.minetest.net/ ? I've not played either game but it might be a nice alternative.

[GreyGeek]

I've looked around and found two commercial replacements: Roblox and Hytale.

Roblox is basically designed for kids who haven't entered puberty, or, it's a joke.

Hytale was recently bought out by Riot Games. On its website it states:

What has become increasingly apparent is that we have several more years of work ahead of us before Hytale is ready to launch. We don’t want to provide another estimated launch window that turns out to be incorrect. However, we no longer expect to be ready to launch Hytale before 2023 at the earliest, and it could very well take longer.

Translation: It will never come to market in my lifetime nor, perhaps, in yours.

I've tried Minetest a couple times, the most recent being a couple years ago. It had advanced nicely from what it was when I first tried it abouta 5 years ago, but it is nowhere near MC in depth of the map and variety of tools. However, that said, I am going to give it another look. Quite frankly, it is now the only game in town.

[Fred47]

Wouldn't you rather play a nice game of chess?

[Bings]

Roblox, reminded me of this I saw earlier...


There's Veloren also which has a MC aesthetic but I don't think it's a building game.

[GreyGeek]

Bings, THAT"S a HOOT!

This morning I installed Minetest and every pkg related to that is in the repository. I created a world map and opened it up. The graphics is a LOT better than what it was when I last tried it about 5+ years ago, but it is still not even close to Minecraft, and that's because the textures on the blocks aren't there yet. It looks pastel and flat. No dimensional sense. The cobble in cobblestone is flat, with no apparent bumpiness like in Minecraft. The sense of depth isn't right. Torches, leaves and other transparent blocks still look like two pieces of colored cardboard interlocked at a 90 degree angle with each other. The sound effects aren't there yet, either. Game mechanics suffer from being both too fast with some actions and too slow with others. Motion seems to take place very rapidly at first, and then the 9.8 m/s^2 acceleration kicks in and blocks fall as they would in nature. It gives a choppy effect to motion.

Switching between creative and survival modes required logging out of the map to the menu, changing the option and restarting the map. One could log in without establishing a user name, so giving my self various privileges was impossible. For example, I could enable flying, start the map in the survival mode and press the K key. Flying was enabled but I couldn't fly. I enabled teleport but wasn't allowed to use it. I enabled throwing and could shoot arrows with a bow, but without mobs what's the point. Mobs were enabled but never appeared. Some features, like 3D, I could turn on, but then couldn't turn off. In the end, the frustrations of working with the global and local settings were too frustrating and unreliable, so I purged the entire game and deleted every file with "minetest" in its name.

So much promise, but it's as if the folks who develop it never spend time playing it or they'd change stuff to be smoother. And then I don't know how much of Mojang's & Microsoft's copyrights are hindering Minetest development.

[GreyGeek]

While playing some more I found that when playing alone one is considered to be a "singleplayer". To get more privileges use "/grantme all". To get things use "/giveme <something> <number>". or, log out switch to creative, and log back in. Then open the inventory and get what you want.

I've found that Minetest has terrible sound effects for most tools. The sound effects aren't moderated according to distance or direction, the way they are in Minecraft. The animal mobs move very awkwardly, with legs pumping while going nowhere or too slowly. To shoot a bow you have to have the arrows in the hotbar right behind the bow. Over all, MT is not an enjoyable experience. There is a YouTuber named Richard Jeffries, who for the last three years has made 300+ MT videos. I wondered why his videos were always in the creative mode and focused on building things. Now I know why.

I've heard that a map called "Mine Clone 2" was created in an attempt to create a more Minecraft-like experience. The block textures are better than the default Minetest and it works more like Minecraft. You only have to have arrows in your inventory, not on the hot bar, in order to shoot them. The mobs are drawn better but for the most part they don't move any better. BTW, you can install the Mine Clone 2 map by using the mods installation tool on the main menu. It is there among the mods and is quickly installed. Unfortunately, it doesn't add the Mine Clone 2 map to the list of maps you may have created, it replaces them. There supposed location, under the .../minetest/games" directory does not exist in the repository version.

I used muon to mark everything related to minetest as "purge" and the dependencies were marked remove. When the purge was over I issued "sudo apt --purge autoremove" to clean the config files, but I still had to use "sudo updatedb" to reload the "locate" database and then do a search "locate minetest" to find leftover cases, which I removed manually from the Konsole.

So, thus endeth my Minecraft days.