[Forever-free Friday] MineTest (the FOSS Minecraft-like)
[Forever-free Friday] MineTest (the FOSS Minecraft-like)
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.
Minetest started as a FOSS version of Minecraft and has grown into an entire platform that you can run other games inside. It runs on Windows, Mac, FreeBSD, Linux, Android, and probably more. I've only given it a quick play but I've seen a few posts praising it for being what Minecraft used to be, so if you miss the good old days then this could be the game for you. There's already some good discussion about running it on a Steam Deck on this post (which points to this blog post).
Anyone played before and have any recommendations for good games to play?
Love me some minetest! There's quite a few good games for it. I'd recommend:
-Exile -Hades Revisited -Nodecore
-Mineclone 2 (if you really want minecraft)
Only problem I found with Mineclone 2 is the default hostile mob generation is a bit...high (which you can adjust in settings). But it otherwise feels basically like Vanilla Minecraft.
Cheers! I had a quick play of each of them, do they need wikis or similar to tell you how to play and how everything works, or am I just not seeing the instructions?
I am a Dev for mineclone2. A lot of people have a hard time understanding that minetest is confusingly both a game and a game engine. The little game that comes with it whwn you download is not all that there is to see. There are a lot more developed and fully fleshed put games, mods, and texture packs available to download through the online content section.
Mineclone2 is the closest thing to what I want in a Minecraft alternative, the problem is lack of a streamlined wiki for people who aren't devs but simply wish to play. There's not even a comprehensive list of differences between mc2 and Minecraft, just a simple list with a disclaimer that mc2 is feature incomplete. With how technical Minecraft is, knowing the exact differences between the games is important even for casual play.
I've tried MineTest a couple times, and as much as I want to love it, its just so slow and clunky and ugly compared to Minecraft. I just redownloaded it, intending to grab screenshots to compare the visuals, but got fed up with the lag spikes, and how long it was taking to build a scene to match Minecraft before I could even finish that. I was getting performance comparable to a mid-weight Minecraft shader-pack just running on default settings.
ugly compared to Minecraft Is it not almost identical textures to Minecraft? And wasn't Minecraft always pretty laggy anyway?
The textures are very different although those can be swapped out (albiet with very limitted options if you aren't willing to build the pack yourself). Its more the lighting and shading I don't like. They tend to look a lot more washed out and flat compared to Minecraft. Turning on the more intensive and/or experemental features helps a lot, but falls far short of whats easily available for Minecraft and makes the already iffy performance noticably worse.
In terms of performance, I was struggling to even maintain 144fps on MineTest with regular drops down to 90. I was finding I was getting about half the framerate on average compared to Vanilla Minecraft, with almost no difference running around loading chunks, and a significant advantage for Minecraft in more static areas. That said, Minecraft is a game with a massive modding scene with access to engine-level changes, and using a bunch of the more popular optimization mods mean I tend to be getting roughly double the framerate compared to vanilla Minecraft and four times that of Minetest.
Im sure stuff can be improved, but the userbase and development backing just isn't there as it stands.
The thumbnail image is so appealing, so when you said it looks ugly compared to Minecraft I could not help but feel a little betrayed
How's this compare to vintage story?
What's vintage story?
Check it out. A massively complex Minecraft like game focused on slow, incremental progress.
Some horror elements.
You even knap stone tools and so on. I'm enjoying it in the rare time I get to play.
There's also ClassiCube.
It's basically a FOSS C-reimplementation of the very old Minecraft version.
I have been using this for a couple years at least and one of my biggest gripes is not understanding how to get one of the mods that add sprinting to work. Otherwise, I absolutely enjoy this as an alternative to minecraft.