Minetest rules! If you want your one free Minecraft clone to rule them all, this is it. It helps to look at mods and mix and match them to get something you are happy with. But there’s a huge variety, and lots you can do.
german server: https://illuna-minetest.tk/ by https://tchncs.de/
(It’s hosted in Germany, but you should be fine playing on it, even if you only speak English.)
It kind of sucks though
The base game? It much better when you install the mods/games. The base install is basically just a game engine. Mineclone2 is good.
Right. That’s how it works. You have to install mods. And you can set them up to be just like vanilla Minecraft, kinda like Technic pack, or many other things. But if you are not someone who likes Minecraft, you won’t like Minetest either.
The thing is they go so onboard with “if you want a feature mod it in” that the main game is very empty and since most anybody expects a game to be fully featured from the start it generally leaves a bad taste in anybody’s mouth. It also is graphically outdated and the community is small. I love the project and I’d love to see it succeed but it will be a while before it becomes something people other than die hard open source fans will use more than a couple times.
Eh, I think the decent performance while still being moddable, is something that can be sold to people who don’t even know what open-source is.
And the same goes for the basically unlimited world height, which allows for generating much nicer mountains and caves than could be generated in Minecraft. It also allows for distributing ores much deeper down, so you can’t anymore just dig down to diamond level in a few minutes. You actually need to build stations in the caves, lay down tracks to get quickly in and out, and bring ladders for exploring.
I know that this is harder to sell than a few pretty corals and I certainly don’t disagree that Minetest is a good game engine, less so a good game, but I don’t see it as dire. If anyone is inspired to create an excellent Minecraft-like game, they have a great basis for that in Minetest. And it’s really easy to install these alternative games into Minetest. People might also see modded Minetest in videos or screenshots and ask how to get specifically that.
I don’t see that as a major issue. I don’t think anyone really plays vanilla MC after you’ve had a few runs. I remember downloading whole launchers that only served to download modpacks like tekit (IIRC).
So one just has to get use to minetest just being a game engine. Maybe they could include mineclone2 as a default mod, but they have a built in mod downloader that makes it all pretty painless.
