Minetest

Minetest is a Minecraft-like voxel sandbox engine. It is an engine that allows different voxel-based games to run on it. It's for games in which the world is made out of cubes and the player runs in the environment and manipulates it, preferably by digging and building blocks, collecting items, crafting, and so on. It can be played alone or online with other players.

Games
Most games for Minetest are open-ended sandbox games focusing on creativity. Most of them involve digging and placing blocks, but that isn't the only thing the games include.

By default, Minetest comes with a game called “Minetest Game”. But the main “selling point” of Minetest is the support for various other voxel games and modding. Minetest Game does not reflect the whole gaming experience of Minetest. The community has developed a vast library of mods and games over the years, but some of these games might be noteworthy enough for their own article in this wiki.

See Category:Minetest games for a list of Free games in Minetest.

How to start
The learning curve can be steep for complete newcomers, the Minetest Community Wiki has a “Getting Started” guide for that. There's also a tutorial (which must be downloaded as a game from the “Content” tab first).

When you're a bit familiar with the game, you can either jump right into the action by joining a multiplayer server, which host their own games, and Minetest just does the rest for you (no extra installation required). Or you can download one of many community-created games from the Content DB.



Features

 * Singleplayer mode and multiplayer support for tens of players
 * Server-side modding for unique gameplay mechanics. Just join the server and start playing!
 * Content DB allows you to download and update community-created games, mods and texture packs within Minetest
 * Runs natively on Windows, GNU/Linux, macOS and FreeBSD
 * Designed to be lightweight
 * Give the game an unique appearance with texture packs
 * 8 unique map generators to create different types of worlds
 * Lots of options to customize the map generation
 * Supports multiple languages
 * Supports game additions and modifications written in Lua

Release history
The 0.3.x series was released in November 2011. The 0.4.x series was released in July 2012 to address shortcomings in the previous series. These are the most important changes, summarized: