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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.

Minetest-c55 is inspired by InfiniMiner/Minecraft and similar games.

Minetest-c55 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.Vorlage:Failed verification

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

The player has a lot of freedom in how they play this game, with the main aims being survival and building shelters. At the beginning of a game the player spawns in a random, procedurally-generated environment.

The world consists of textured 3D Cubes, (known as blocks or nodes) in a grid which represent different materials (e.g. wood, dirt, stone) and are each an equivalent to 1 metre³ in the real world. These blocks are arranged in a way that is quite similar to the real world: There are hills, forests, lakes, caves and other landscapes. There are also different biomes like deserts. The player can move freely thoughout the landscape.

The player can dig the various materials found around them, which will then appear in their inventory. Once the player has acquired enough of some material, they can then place those materials in the world. This makes it possible to create buildings in any shape or size that the player can imagine. To gain more items and/or other materials, the player must either craft them or craft tools to dig them up in the world (e.g. you need a pickaxe to cut stone and minerals like iron), or create those materials in a furnace.

There are many different minerals and resources in Minetest, ranging from trees and soil to more rare materials such as "Mese", which is used to build powerful pickaxes and as the primary conductive material in the electronics mod "Mesecons" (which is comparable to Redstone).

The player also has a health bar. The health can be decreased by touching lava, falling from a great height, or by other events in the world. It can be restored by eating apples or other food. When the health reaches zero, the player dies and respawns at random position 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 aboveground. Such creatures may harm the player by either throwing fireballs at the player, or charging at them.

The game world 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, called "MapBlocks", which are only created or loaded into memory when the player is nearby.

Single- and Multiplayer

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

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, build together, etc. This also offers the ability for users to fight in teams against some in-game enemy, or to fight against each other as well (a function known as Player-vs-Player), assuming the server administrator has enabled this latter ability. What a player can do in multiplayer mode is entirely dependent on what the administrator of the server they connect to has enabled or installed; any mods that the player has installed on their own client machine are ignored, since the code is run by the server rather than the client.

Each install of Minetest-c55 comes with both the standard graphical client and a command-line-driven server program. The "game" (that is, the client software that the player usually uses) is also capable of acting as a dedicated server when not already connected to one.

Game Modes - Survival vs. Creative

Minetest-c55 has two game playing modes, survival and creative. Each mode has its strengths and weaknesses, and the server administrator (or the local user/player in a singleplayer game) can chose which mode they want to use.

Survival Mode

In this mode, the player has a health bar which is depleted by attacks from monsters, falls, environmental damage, drowning (added by a mod), 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 many sundry types of food, such as zombie flesh (which, don't worry, you can cook to eat.)

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 (slowly) or to dig soil, and then use the wood gained from the tree to build a pickaxe, which can then be used to cut stone and mine ores, until the user breaks that tool or has constructed a more durable one. Tools made out of better materials (such as iron instead of wood or stone) perform their tasks more quickly and can be used for a longer period before breaking (assuming the player doesn't periodically repair them). By default, the longest-lasting and fastest-cutting tool is the Mese Pickaxe, which also serves as a sort of "do everything" tool.

The game has an inventory system, and the player is limited in the number of items they can carry. Specifically, there are 32 item "spaces", each of which can hold at least one item. In most cases, a slot can hold several (or even hundreds) of the same item, referred to as a "stack" of that item.

By default, Player versus Player (or PvP for short) is be enabled to allow fighting between players. This option can be disabled by a server administrator if so desired.

Creative Mode

The creative mode inventory screen.

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" screen.

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 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 items, blocks, etc.

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

Customizing Minetest-c55

Modding

Example of a mod, "pipeworks" here.

Datei:Minetest Animals Mod.jpg

A dog (petted Wolf) created by the "animals" mod.

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. One could, for example, create a rudimentary first-person shooter, though the world would still be cube-based.

Since mods are installed and executed server-side, the client (the player connecting to the server) does not have to install those mods into their copy of Minetest-c55. 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. Vorlage:Clear

Texture Packs

In Minetest-c55, is it possible to override the game's (and any mods') textures using a collection of third-party imagery known as a "texture pack."

These packs range from ones which simply supply imagery that a user might consider "better", to ones 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.

• 
  The default texture pack: 16×16 pixels
• 
  Minetoon: 250×250 pixels (plus some mods' default textures at other sizes)
• 
  Photo-realistic HDX texture pack: 512x512 pixels

Development

0.3

The 0.3 branch had two stable releases: 0.3.0 on November 1, 2011, and 0.3.1 on November 9, 2011.

0.3.1 was the last stable version before 0.4.0. 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. In the development of this version, the game has been split into an engine and the actual game content. This has in turn made it trivial to add new mods or to modify the default game, provided the user has a working knowledge of Lua.

There are currently three stable releases of this version: 0.4.0, 0.4.1. and 0.4.3

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.

Sources and Links

External links

• Official website
• Official forum
• Official wiki