Minetest-c55

Minetest-c55 is one of the first InfiniMiner/Minecraft(/whatever) inspired games (started October 2010), with a goal of taking the survival multiplayer gameplay to a slightly different direction.

It also serves as a learning project for me, celeron55, the author of the game. I am making it as a hobby, so progress isn't particularly fast. If you need a reminder of this project, the blog has an RSS feed.

The main design philosophy is to keep it technically simple, stable and portable. It will be kept lightweight enough to run on fairly old hardware. It runs playably on a laptop with Intel 945GM graphics.

It is released under the GPL, with the intention that that way it is a lot easier to use by Linux users and people can report and help fix bugs more effectively.

This game is under development, and as of now, the game does not really differ from Minecraft except for having a lot less features. Still, playing is quite fun already, especially for people who have not been able to experience Minecraft.

To you minecraft fanatics:

(Originally written on reddit.com in November 2010)

I know a lot of people here are thinking that I am cloning a game, meanly and effortlessly copying what others have done, possibly making some fancy cheap technical improvements or something.

You could say all the first person shooters today are clones of Quake. They all look the same and mostly you can do the same things in them. Still everybody thinks they are different games and not clones. Why is it so?

The thing is, solely the game engine has considerably differing strengths compared to Minecraft's, which will probably lead to different gameplay. You know - a different game, that is.

This game isn't intended to be technically better, and I am doing it because I think this game type has potential for more good games. Also, this is an unbeatable project for learning stuff. You know, making a thing like this is painfully difficult - guess why there aren't too many proper "clones" out there? [Editor's note: This has been changing lately - but was the case even half a year after the inital release.]

Features

• Survival mode with inventory and crafting. This mode is being currently developed.
• Creative mode with infinite blocks at your disposal. This is a by-product of making the actual game and not the actual focus of development.
• Multiplayer support for N players
  (My development server has never got more than 10, but I have heard that someone has hosted 100 players on an Atom notebook...)
• Voxel based dynamic lighting (quite similar to Minecraft)
  (Light up caves with torches!)
• Almost infinite world (limited to +-31000 blocks in all directions at the moment)
  (Minecraft has a height restriction of 128 blocks)
• Infinite map generator
  (Does quite good maps already.)
• Runs natively on Windows, Linux and OS X
  (C++ and Irrlicht. No Java.)

Considerable shortcomings, as of now

Most of these will be worked on in the future.

• Quite limited range of craftable items (list of items)
• Mobs suck
• No sounds
• ...And probably many more. It's basically at the state at which Minecraft was in the early Infdev days.
• Some kind of modding support

Public servers

Wiki page

Links & other

• IRC Channels:
  • #minetest @ Freenode (english)
  • #minetest @ IRCnet (finnish)
• The Author: Perttu Ahola, celeron55 @ IRCnet and gmail.com
• Old news section (for historical purposes)