Knowledge Base

I recently tried Luanti, which is really an engine for various voxel games. The one "game" I tried in it is of course one of the Minecraft clones. I picked Mineclonia. I enjoyed the in-game content browser, but it had some flaws.

The download speed of the website is slow, below 100kB per second so it can take some time, and even it failed a few times. The in-game downloader doesn't indicate what went wrong other than "failed." If run from a console, the console might show that the website timeout was reached. You can visit the download link for a game/mod/texture pack, and move the downloaded zip file to ~/.minetest. Then explode the zip inside a directory named the correct thing: game or mods. I did not try any texture packs.

The game is supposed to be a clone of Minecraft, and the last time I played that was back in 2012. So there's so many new features. There's traders wandering around, and way more flowers and wildlife than I remember.

After dying a few times, I learned that I just needed to modify the settings for this "game" to allow "keep inventory."

It's been an enjoyable experience, digging the Mines of Moria again. I wasn't in the Free Software world back then, but now I am, and Luanti scratches this itch! I was also impressed that running a headless server was as easy as running luanti --server. It chooses the default (only) game and gets it started. And backing up the world is of course as easy as targzing the directory. There's more complicated steps for bupping a live world, but my 0200 cron job will never interfere with my playing.

And I remember futzing around with Java. In Windows, that was annoying. It's still mildly frustrating in a GNU+Linux world, but Luanti doesn't even need java. I call that an improvement as well. Just apt-get install luanti.

For the Free Software netizen with a desire to avoid creepers and find diamond ore, go try Luanti.

I have not been paid for saying any this. If anybody wants to change that, let me know!