Luanti (formerly Minetest) v5.14 brings an improved minimap, particle improvements and UI tweaks

Luanti (formerly Minetest) has a fresh small release out with v5.14 bringing a couple of gameplay tweaks and various other improvements. What is Luanti? An open source voxel game engine. You can play many different games made with it, like the popular VoxeLibre pictured below.

Pictured - VoxeLibre in Luanti

This Luanti release makes a tweak to the main menu to help prevent player confusion, removing world-related options when no world is selected. They've also made it easier to select text in the menu and game text fields, and nametags can now scale by distance to help you see who is nearby and who aren't. Some other changes to the game include an update to particles like the when you're digging, with these now shown to all players, not just you.

My favourite little change from this release is the upgrade to how the minimap works. Now it actually shows the correct tiles on top of land, like grass, so you know exactly what's around you. Small thing but looks much better.

Grass on minimap in Devtest before and after

There's also been some optimizations to how certain mapblocks are stored, plus textures should now load faster with paths being cached and more.

Lots to come in future release with some of their plans to include inventory image animations, a dark mode theme for the main menu, more accessibility settings and the list goes on.