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Minetest, the Minecraft-like voxel game engine (and a basic game that comes with it) has a big new release out with Minetest 5.4.0 and it's worth trying again.

As we covered before during the Release Candidate stage, one of the big features for users in this release is vastly easier modding with both small mod packs and entire games. Minetest had a way to browse and download them all directly in the game for a while, but now it will also actually download all the dependencies mods need - making it vastly easier to get what you want and then into a game. No more downloading one mod, then finding all the individual bits it needs.

The built-in base game "Minetest Game" also went through a few enhancements. While quite bare-bones by itself, it does serve as a nice base to show off the engine and for extending with mods. With Minetest 5.4.0 it now has a crafting guide, 5 more wood variants, environmental sounds for lava and active furnaces, new translations and multiple bug fixes. So it continues the slow and steady build-up into something a bit bigger out of the box.

Other new features include the cross-hair changing when pointing at objects, freely bindable mouse buttons, name-tags for players now have a semi-transparent background, there's a caverns option for the flat map generation, the 'place' and 'fig' keys are now freely configurable, lots of modding enhancements and plenty of bug fixes overall like stopping players being able to accessing inventories of others.

Pictured - Minetest 5.4.0 with a few mods.

Really great to see this free and open source game engine and game doing so well. Going by the official server list, looks like quite a lot of people regularly play various games with Minetest, with multiple hundreds online at the time this article goes live - awesome!

Full changelog can be seen here. See more on the Minetest website.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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5 comments

amatai Feb 24, 2021
I had a revelation when I understand that Minetest is not a game but an open source engine like Godot or Ogre. I'm looking forward the creation of STR, racing game, FPS and all on Minetest
Numeric Feb 24, 2021
Side Note: MineClone 2, the popular Minetest game known for its efforts to replicate the Minecraft 1.12 experience, has undergone some major changes itself. The last few releases have added in major features such as the experience system and enchantments. The current version (0.70.0) was the last release under the talented project maintainer/developer Wuzzy. The torch has been passed to two active contributors, Fleckenstein and kay27, who are well underway in tiding up the 0.71.0 release. Based on the git page, it seems to have a lot of nice improvements https://git.minetest.land/MineClone2/MineClone2/issues/997#issuecomment-13272

Thanks Wuzzy for all your years of hard work!


Last edited by Numeric on 24 February 2021 at 4:38 pm UTC
Nezchan Feb 24, 2021
Quoting: NumericSide Note: MineClone 2, the popular Minetest game known for its efforts to replicate the Minecraft 1.12 experience, has undergone some major changes itself. The last few releases have added in major features such as the experience system and enchantments. The current version (0.70.0) was the last release under the talented project maintainer/developer Wuzzy. The torch has been passed to two active contributors, Fleckenstein and kay27, who are well underway in tiding up the 0.71.0 release. Based on the git page, it seems to have a lot of nice improvements https://git.minetest.land/MineClone2/MineClone2/issues/997#issuecomment-13272

Thanks Wuzzy for all of your years of hard work!

I tried that recently, and it's pretty good. I like the double chest mechanic a lot. Although it could stand with a lot more interior design recipes. Not much motivation to build a cool house if it's just standing there with empty rooms.

Still, looking forward to the 5.4.0 release, even though it's not on the Ubuntu-MATE repository yet. I imagine it'll show up in the next few days sometime.
Philadelphus Feb 25, 2021
Quotethe 'place' and 'fig' keys are now freely configurable
Now I'm really curious, what does the 'fig' key do?
Purple Library Guy Feb 25, 2021
Quoting: Philadelphus
Quotethe 'place' and 'fig' keys are now freely configurable
Now I'm really curious, what does the 'fig' key do?
Well, now that it's configurable it will give you either dry or fresh figs. Fig newtons are still in beta.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 25 February 2021 at 7:53 am UTC
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