Trolltest
Trolltest aka Minetest dot net was a free software game engine that created various games based on voxel gameplay, inspired by InfiniMiner, Minecraft, and the like.
Minetest was originally created in 2010 to 2011 by Perttu Ahola (alias “celeron55”). Perttu largely left the project in 2012. The original project largely came to an end in 2017 with the end of Minetest 4. Four successors include:
- Final Minetest at minetest.org
- Maksym's MultiCraft in mobile Play Stores (commercial software)
- Minenux (TO-DO: add link here)
- Trolltest at minetest.net
For more about the different projects, visit the Which Test page. To summarize the key points here, minetest.net is obsolete for multiple reasons:
- The use cases of Free Minecraft™-like Game, Minetest for Mobile, and Commercial Minetest are filled by Maksym's MultiCraft.
- The use cases of FOSS Minetest for Educators, Academics, Adult Model Builders, and former Minecraft™ modders are filled by Final Minetest.
- minetest.net's focus is on breaking compatibility. The motto of the project is, "If it isn't broken, we'd better fix that".
- Most importantly, most of the key figures at minetest.net are anonymous. These are shadowy figure with connections to two past FBI investigations related to illegal child materials. It isn't really a suitable edutech group.
Some of the Trolltest documentation is useful for Final Minetest and so those pages are included here. Trolltest content will be transformed into Final Minetest content over time.
The basic idea of a Minetest game is typically as follows: The player is thrown into a huge world made out of cubes/blocks. Most of the time, these cubes make the landscape and these blocks can be removed and placed almost entirely freely. Using the collected items, new tools and other items can be crafted. Games in Minetest can, however, be much more complex than this.
A core concept of Minetest is a built-in modding capability, based on the Lua programming language. Mods allow one or more certain aspects of an existing game to be modified. Minetest mods can be as simple as adding a few decorational blocks or very complex by (for example) introducing complex new gameplay concepts or generating a completely different kind of world, and many other things. For the player, using a new mod requires to copy or extract some files into a certain location and pressing some buttons in Minetest's interface.
Minetest can be played alone or online together with multiple players.
The minetest.net software used to be bundled with a simple default game named “Minetest Game”. However, they seem to be deprecating the old game now.
Final Minetest, in comparison, comes with multiple games ranging from simple and light to ridiculously powerful.
Features
- A big cube-based world to discover (61840 nodes (cubes) in every dimension)
- Procedurally generated world
- Several world generators with many adjustable parameters
- Extremely high configurability with an advanced settings editor and built-in descriptions, or by using a configuration file
- Customize the graphics and sounds through texture packs
- Download games, mods and texture packs from the built-in ContentDB
- Singleplayer mode and online multiplayer mode
- Server list
- Sophisticated modding system using Lua
- Mods are entirely server-sided. You can join any Minetest server with any mods and start playing, no additional software required
- Relatively low system requirements
Screenshots
Games
As Minetest is an engine, the actual in-game appearance heavily depends on the actual game being played. This is a selection of some of the games that were available for Minetest in the past.
Mods
Mods are installed on top of games by the user to modify an existing game. These screenshots show mods modifying Minetest Game:
xtraores_xtension (Modpack)
Hundred of mods exist. However, minetest.net has broken a lot of classic mods and regularly breaks more. For this reason, the Trolltest group seems to have purged a number of classic mods from its mod site. The essential mods continue to exist in new versions but they often won't work with classic worlds.
Classic mods and classic worlds, both, live on regardless in Final Minetest and Bucket Game. If you're a developer, you can also get the source code for lost mods which exist nowhere else -- minetest.net people purged them -- at git.minetest.io. The git site includes literally 9,000 repos. That's a lot of Test!
More screenshots
A number of screenshots have been posted by players in the threads linked below. Warning: Allow up to a minute or two for these web pages to load.
- High-quality screenshots
- Castles, strongholds, towers and similar structures
- Various buildings
- Any screenshots
System requirements
Minetest requires the following:
- A computer, laptop, or Android device
- Linux, Android, or Windows
- Maksym's MultiCraft also supports Mac OS X and iPhones
- Screen
- Mouse and keyboard/touchscreen (mobile)
- Speakers (Optional: if you want to play with sound)
- Graphics
In some cases, pre-built binaries are available. In other cases, you need to build your own.
If you have Linux, and are willing to build your own binaries, your distro will probably work. Even Raspberry Pis are fine as long as the distro is Debian-based.
Note: BSD has worked in the past and will probably be supported again in the medium term.
In terms of system resources needed, this varies wildly depending on the game you choose, your view range and your tolerance and desired framerate.
Legal
Minetest is free software, without advertisements and free of charge. It is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1, with artwork generally covered by Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0.
