This is the old website. See minetest.net.

Minetest-c55

Minetest is a free and open source infinite-world block sandbox game and a game engine, inspired by InfiniMiner, Minecraft and the like. It has been in development since October 2010.

It is Free and Open Source Software, released under the GPL. This way it is more readily available to Linux users, and random people (you!) can fix bugs and experiment effectively.

Minetest is developed by Perttu "celeron55" Ahola and a number of contributors.

Minetest is technically simple, stable and portable. It is lightweight enough to run on fairly old hardware. It currently runs playably on a laptop with Intel 945GM graphics. Though, as for the CPU, dualcore is recommended.

0.4-dev

The current in-development version is 0.4. It is a major overhaul of the whole thing.

The first stable version of Minetest 0.4 will be released as soon as the modding API is stable enough. Read more.

0.3 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 256 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 + contributors (see github or so)
• Old news section (for historical purposes)