Minetest, now called Luanti, is a free, open-source platform for playing and creating games built from three-dimensional blocks. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD and Android. The engine supplies the shared world, graphics and networking systems, while separate games provide the objects, rules and activities that players encounter.
Voxel games
Choosing a game determines what happens inside a Minetest world. Some games concentrate on mining and construction; others use the block-based environment for puzzles, action or exploration. The built-in content browser provides access to these games.
Minetest Game is one such choice. It offers a peaceful sandbox for gathering materials, crafting tools and building, without built-in enemy creatures or prescribed goals. A furnace turns ores into ingots for further crafting, while tools such as pickaxes and shovels work on different materials. Its creative mode makes almost all items available immediately, shifting the activity from collecting resources to placing and arranging them.
World generation
A world holds the landscape, structures and saved game state. Minetest generates terrain procedurally around the player, and the choice of generator changes the shape of that terrain. A flat world offers level ground for construction, while other generators produce mountain ranges, broad plains or valleys with rivers. Games and mods supply much of the biome content that populates these landscapes.
The engine exposes generator controls in its advanced settings. Creators can also replace the built-in generation with a Lua generator, starting from an empty world and defining how its blocks should be filled.
Game mods
Mods extend a chosen game with additional content or changes to its behavior. Minetest lets players enable installed mods for an individual world, so separate worlds can use different combinations. Compatibility depends on the game: some mods support several games, while others rely on a particular game’s items or systems.
Modpacks group related modifications together. Their component mods remain individually selectable, allowing players to enable part of a collection instead of treating the whole pack as a single switch. The content browser brings games, mods and texture packs into the same place for browsing available additions.
Texture packs
Texture packs change the images used for blocks, items, creatures and interface elements. They alter a world’s appearance separately from its gameplay modifications. Players select a pack through the Content menu, with different image resolutions available among the packs.
Multiplayer
Minetest supports single-player worlds, local multiplayer and online servers. The server browser lists places to join, while a server’s address and port can be entered directly for a private or unlisted destination. When connecting, the client receives the resources needed for that server, so players do not have to assemble its game mods manually beforehand.
Servers maintain their own player accounts. A name and password registered on one server belong to that server rather than to a central platform account. The selected server also determines the game and modifications used in its shared world.
Writing Minetest mods and games in Lua
Creators use a Lua programming interface to add items and control gameplay. The same system supports an addition to an existing game or a collection of mods that forms a separate game. Minetest handles voxel rendering and network communication underneath those scripts, allowing authors to work on game behavior within the engine.
