Minetest
Minetest is...
An open source voxel game engine. Play one of our many games, mod a game to your liking, make your own game, or play on a multiplayer server.
>Available for Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, and Android.
Essentially, it's a game engine used to create and play Minecraft-style games but it can just be downloaded "as-is" and played as a basic Minecraft clone using the included "Minetest Game".
The point is...
I've put quite a lot of hours into Minecraft over the years, but less-so in recent years, especially after its acquisition by Microsoft. Recently I was reminded about Minetest[1] and thought I'd give it another look.
As mentioned, there are other (Minecraft-esque) games available to download for the Minetest engine but I started with a new world in the base "Minetest Game." This seems to be a relatively basic clone without things like animals, monsters, redstone, etc. but it's very easy to add mods -- much more so than Minecraft ever was[2] -- and I'm going to gradually add mods as I go to get the kind of play experience I want. There are certainly plenty of mods available in the official repository.
If you want a more "complete" game (as in closer to Minecraft) it might be worth checking out "Minetest Extended" (a game for Minetest). I'll probably take a look at it at some point but for now I'd rather choose the mods myself. However, note that I haven't tried out this mod yet, nor have I played Minecraft for a long time, so I don't know how close to Minecraft it is.
Journal of the first world
Anyway, I've decided to journal my activities in my newly-created world, for no particular reason. I'm a pretty mediocre builder and rarely have any fixed goals so I don't know if it'll be interesting to anyone or not.
Footnotes
[1] I seem to recall trying it out a few years ago and not being especially impressed, but (if I'm remembering the correct thing) it's matured a lot since then and is now definitely a good Minecraft alternative.
[2] I don't know if Minecraft now has a proper modding API, but it didn't when I last played and installing mods was a bit of a performance.
[Capsule]
Last updated: 2022-04-22