User:Rubenwardy/Minetest

Minetest-c55 (often called Minetest) is a free open-source video game which uses the Irrlicht 3D engine, and is programmed in C++. It is intended to be similar to Minecraft, as it is also a sandbox-building independent video game. It was created by Perttu "celeron55" Ahola and by other contributors and is free software released under the LGPL. It has gained popularity as a Minecraft clone, being in multiple lists of Minecraft alternatives.

Minetest-c55 is inspired by InfiniMiner, Minecraft and similar games. and is focused on creativity and building, allowing players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D world, also known as a voxel world.

Gameplay in its most recent release has two principal modes: Survival, which requires players to acquire resources themselves and maintain their health; and Creative, where the player has an unlimited supply of resources, the ability to fly, and to teleport.

Minetest-c55 can be played in singleplayer or in multiplayer mode, both of which can run in either survival mode or creative mode. It has multiple objectives, including having an open and simple modding process using Lua and running natively on old and new machines.

Gameplay
Minetest offers multiple gameplay styles with the main focus of survival and building structures. At the beginning of a new game the player spawns in a random, procedurally-generated environment.

The world consists of textured 3D cubes, known as nodes, in a grid which represent different materials such as wood, dirt, stone, and are each an equivalent to 1 metre3 in the real world. The nodes are arranged in a way that is similar to the real world: There are hills, forests, lakes, caves and other landscapes including biomes like deserts. The player can move freely across the landscape.

The player can also dig the various materials found around them, which will appear in their inventory. Once the player has acquired some material, they can then place them in the world. This makes it possible to create buildings in any shape or size the player desires. To gain more items and/or other materials, the player must either craft them or craft tools such as a pickaxe or shovel to dig them up in the world, or create those materials in a furnace.

There are many different minerals and resources in Minetest, ranging from trees and soil to more rare or sometimes fictional materials, such as Mese, which is used to build powerful pickaxes and as a conductive material in the mod "Mesecons" (which is similar to Minecraft's "redstone").

The HUD features a health bar, which denotes the player's health. Health can be decreased by touching lava, falling from a great height, or by being harmed during other events in the world. However, it can be restored by eating apples or other food. When the health reaches zero, the player dies and respawns at random position relatively close to the center of the map.

Friendly and hostile NPCs, also known as mobs, can be added to the game with third-party mods. Some mods add friendly animals that spawn during the day, which often can provide useful materials such as milk or wool, or creatures which only spawn at night or in dark areas above ground. These creatures may harm the player by either throwing or shooting objects at the player, charging at them or exploding.

The map is procedurally generated as the player explores it. Minetest allows for an seemingly-infinitely large game world to be generated on the horizontal and vertical planes, only running into technical limitations when extremely distant locations are reached. The game achieves this by splitting the game world data into smaller sections, known as "MapBlocks", which are only created or loaded into memory when the player is nearby.

Minetest-c55 has two game playing modes, Survival and Creative. Each mode is unique, and the server administrator or local player (in a singleplayer game) can chose which mode to use.

Survival Mode
In this mode, the player has a health bar which may be depleted by attacks from hostile mobs, falls, environmental damage, drowning, or falling into lava. Health replenishes when the player eats food. Upon dying, the player is respawned at current spawn point, if one has been set. Otherwise, the player is taken to a somewhat random spot very close to the center of the map.

The player can acquire different resources and craft tools, weapons, food, and various other items. By acquiring better resources, the player can make "better" or more effective items and tools. For example, the player can use his or her hand to chop down trees or to dig soil, and then use the wood gained from the tree to build tools such as a pickaxe, which can be used to cut stone and mine ores, or an axe, which can chop trees more efficiently, until the user breaks that tool or has constructed a more durable one. Tools made out of stronger materials, such as iron instead of wood or stone, perform their tasks more quickly and can be used for a longer period before breaking if the player doesn't periodically repair them. By default, the longest-lasting and fastest-cutting tool is the Mese Pickaxe.

The game has an inventory system, and the player is limited in the number of items they can carry. By default there are 32 slots for items, each of which can hold at least one item. In most cases, a slot can hold up to hundreds of the same item. These are referred to as stacks.

By default, Player versus Player (PvP) is be enabled to allow fighting between players. This option can be toggled on and off by a server administrator.

Creative Mode


In creative mode, the main objective is for the player to build.

The player has access to unlimited materials and items via the creative inventory.

The player can simply drag the items from the creative inventory on the left to their working inventory on the right, and then proceed to place those items into their world as usual.

If a player or server administrator adds one or more mods to their install, any items added by those mods, such as mobs, new tools or colored blocks, will show up automatically in the creative inventory unless the mod specifies otherwise, giving players access to potentially thousands of various items.

In this mode, any mobs that have been added to the game can still spawn as in survival mode.

Single player and Multiplayer
Minetest-c55 is capable of running a local, single-player game, or an online multiplayer server. In single-player mode, the game acts as if the player is an administrator running his or her own server and gives access to everything the game is capable of doing. The player is able to grant himself or herself the ability to fly, directly acquire materials without mining, and more.

In multiplayer mode, the player instructs their game to connect to another machine that is running Minetest-c55 as a server. Multiple users can connect to these servers at once and chat, exchange materials and build together. This also offers the ability for users to fight in teams against an in-game enemy, or to fight against each other as well, as long as PvP has been enabled. Player abilities (technically known as privs) in multiplayer mode are determined by the administrator of the server; any mods that the player has installed on their own client machine are ignored, as the code is run by the server instead of the client.

Each install of Minetest-c55 comes with both the standard graphical client and a command-line-driven server program. The client software is also capable of acting as a dedicated server when not connected to one.

Modding
Modding is done using the simple programming language Lua.

The Modding API is extensive, and because Minetest-c55 is split into an engine and the actual game, one can extend the game without affecting the engine that runs it. This makes it possible for someone to develop an entirely new game based around the engine, and which looks and acts in a totally different manner from the existing game. For example, one could create a rudimentary first-person shooter, though the world would still be cube-based.

Since mods are installed and executed server-side, the player does not have to install those mods themselves. Instead, the client software will download the item information and media at runtime, while the server proceeds to execute the actual code.

A collection of downloadable mods can be found on the Minetest-c55 Forum.

Texture Packs
In Minetest-c55, it is possible to override the textures of a game or mod textures using a collection of third-party imagery known as a texture pack.

These packs range from those which simply supply imagery that a user might consider better, to those which increase the resolution but still maintain the default look of the game, to creating a whole new "theme" for the game, such as an alien world or a cartoon-like environment.

By default, the game supplies a basic set of 16×16 pixel textures made to invoke a roughly Earth-like environment.

0.2
Version 0.2 of Minetest featured map saves, ladders, lava apple trees and bug fixes from previous developer betas. Minetest 0.2 is the oldest stable release currently available. It was released on August 22, 2011.

0.3
Version 0.3 had three stable releases: 0.3.0 on November 1, 2011, 0.3.1 on November 9, 2011 and 0.3.2 on May 12, 2012.

The modding API had not yet been created, and the engine and game content had not yet been separated in this version, so third-party mods were not possible without modifying the core game code. Players were limited to the default content of the game.

0.4
0.4 is the current stable version and the successor to Minetest 0.3. In this version, the game has been split into an engine and the actual game content. This has made it trivial to add new mods or to modify the default game using Lua.

0.4 added many new features to the game like falling nodes (such as sand and gravel), stairs or wool. With the advent of the new modding API in the engine, a large number of new mods have been made by the Minetest community, which add more and varied features to the game, such as animals, beds or additional ores.

There are many stable releases of this version. The current release in 0.4.16.