What is Minetest/Luanti?
For starters, Minetest is the original name, and it has been recently renamed to Luanti. This is a voxel game engine powered by Lua, not to be confused with minetest, the bare-bones game it comes with out-of-the box.
For clarity, when I refer to Luanti, I am referring to the engine and launcher. When I say Minetest, it will be in reference to the actual game.
Luanti is an open source voxel game engine. Unlike minecraft, it has a well defined API baked in, making modification to any game running on its engine simple. Likewise, its launcher is connected directly to the Luanti content database. You can install games and mods directly from its launcher, and each game has its own mods folder, and can be modified on the fly.
Minetest is the original game developed for Luanti. It is a bare-bones voxel survival game reminiscent of Minecraft Alpha and early beta. It has no hunger or sprinting, and the player model has limited animations.
There are also no mobs of any kind.
This is as intended; it is not meant to be a full game. It is meant to be a bedrock in which to add on mods; to make your own experience with.
Luanti Launcher
Here you can select the game you want to play, adjust settings, and download content
Luanti Worlds
Now, in Minecraft, the world is not infinite, however it is significantly larger than the Earth, but with a limited build height.
In Luanti, the world-generation is not that of a flat plane; but that of a cube. In each direction, you can travel just under 31k blocks. 30927 to be exact. Up or Down, Left or Right, Forward or Back.
This means that you have just under 622 kilometers of surface area. However, you get a lot of build-height as a trade-off.
Personally, I never go that far in a minecraft world anyway. I have played on a server before with less than half that area, and it never felt particularly crowded.
Additionally, unlike minecraft, there are no additional realms. There are mods that add things like the Nether or End, however they do this by placing them far below and above the world respectively.
Lighting works via raycasting, and, as such, gets completely pitch black in caves without a torch.
Shaders come built in, but you will need to extend their functionality with mods to get the most out of them. They are installed just like any other mod.
The physics is a little different. You can't expect to land in a one-block puddle of water after a major fall and expect to survive. Water adds massive drag, but you still need a bit to make a fall at terminal velocity survivable. You will continue to accelerate as you fall, and damage is calculated based on your velocity on impact with the ground. Given how deep the ore generation is by default, you tend to dig 2x1 shafts straight down and line them with ladders. Ladders slow your fall like water. So you tend to jump down, and control your speed by occasionally veering off into a section of ladder.
A Note on mods
Luanti Mods are mostly stable by the time they make it to the content database, however updates to the engine can sometimes cause issues. You may see some error messages in your chat window occasionally. If you didn't crash, and you aren't getting a bunch of them all the time, it is probably fine.
Crashes do happen, though.
Fortunately, the Luanti engine is robust at error handling. I have never failed to have it save before the game actually closes, meaning you can jump right back in. You can also generally remove most mods safely even after world generation. So, if a mod is causing you problems, you can generally remove it without hassle.
Why Luanti Matters
Minecraft was a huge part of my childhood. I started playing it in the early beta, and was watching some of the earliest minecraft series back when it was in alpha. I had a lot of fun.
Then Mojang got sold off to Microsoft. The community became more and more toxic, and dramatic. What was once a cult indie game, became just another corpo product to peddle to the masses.
Right now, you can still do mostly what you want with it. Right now.
Microsoft can, and has, changed their terms of service for Minecraft at any point. You already have paid mods and a degree of micro-transactions.
They, thankfully, have mostly been hands-off. They let the modding scene mostly be. They let creators continue to use the game for their series.
What happens when they decide that they want more?
Microsoft is a massive corpo, and Minecraft is a huge property. All you need is one single change of leadership, and some greedy shareholders, and suddenly minecraft is unrecognizable.
And we would have no way of stopping it.
Luanti - Minetest - is open source. It can't be taken away from us. There is a game for it that aims for near feature-parity with minecraft. There are entirely unique games unrelated to minecraft as well. It is yours as soon as you download it, and if the team behind it grows greedy or short-sighted, well you can get a fork of it.
Besides - Minetest is legitimately fun with a good spread of mods, and you can always make your own mod for it if you have the time to learn the API.
So, I decided to make this page dedicated to minetest in all of its glory. To show off some of my experiences in the game, and maybe-just maybe, encourage others to at least give it a try.
~Mimicschest