FOSSPicks
Voxel game engine
Minetest
At first glance, Minetest looks like a clone of the now venerable Minecraft, and to some extent it is. It features voxel graphics, there are both creative and survival game modes, and there's a huge modding community of people that spend their time designing and building unique environments within the game. All of this will be familiar to Minecraft players. But Minetest offers much more than this. It's open source (unlike Minecraft, which despite Notch's early promises is not), and this means that you can invest your time in the code and the game engine sure in the knowledge that it won't become redundant when development drops or moves to a different platform. The Minetest community has fully embraced this, creating many of their own games, mods, and textures, many of which can be downloaded for free from the main website.
Minetest improves on Minecraft in other important ways too. There's a Lua-based API that can be used to augment your creations in only the way a programming language can. Maps can be huge, incorporating 62,000 cubic voxels, and there's a gallery of user-created games and maps that can often be freely built upon or incorporated into your own worlds. While it may not have the depth of crafting mechanics of Minecraft, Minetest conveys a greater sense of jeopardy because the worlds are larger and feel more unknown, especially in survival mode where you have to explore and craft your way through the night and from one virtual day to the next. It's also a great way to play with new game ideas separate from the mining, crafting, and trading of the traditional mechanics. The environment is perfect for building scripted adventures, or an RPG, or even simple collections games, all of which can be found in the database of games created by users.
Project Website
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
![Learn More](https://www.linux-magazine.com/var/linux_magazin/storage/images/media/linux-magazine-eng-us/images/misc/learn-more/834592-1-eng-US/Learn-More_medium.png)
News
-
NVIDIA Released Driver for Upcoming NVIDIA 560 GPU for Linux
Not only has NVIDIA released the driver for its upcoming CPU series, it's the first release that defaults to using open-source GPU kernel modules.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 24.07 Released
If you’re into rolling release Linux distributions, OpenMandriva ROME has a new snapshot with a new kernel.
-
Kernel 6.10 Available for General Usage
Linus Torvalds has released the 6.10 kernel and it includes significant performance increases for Intel Core hybrid systems and more.
-
TUXEDO Computers Releases InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen9 Laptop
Sporting either AMD or Intel CPUs, the TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 is an extremely compact, lightweight, sturdy powerhouse.
-
Google Extends Support for Linux Kernels Used for Android
Because the LTS Linux kernel releases are so important to Android, Google has decided to extend the support period beyond that offered by the kernel development team.
-
Linux Mint 22 Stable Delayed
If you're anxious about getting your hands on the stable release of Linux Mint 22, it looks as if you're going to have to wait a bit longer.
-
Nitrux 3.5.1 Available for Install
The latest version of the immutable, systemd-free distribution includes an updated kernel and NVIDIA driver.
-
Debian 12.6 Released with Plenty of Bug Fixes and Updates
The sixth update to Debian "Bookworm" is all about security mitigations and making adjustments for some "serious problems."
-
Canonical Offers 12-Year LTS for Open Source Docker Images
Canonical is expanding its LTS offering to reach beyond the DEB packages with a new distro-less Docker image.
-
Plasma Desktop 6.1 Released with Several Enhancements
If you're a fan of Plasma Desktop, you should be excited about this new point release.