In light of recent events it might be worth for fans of Minecraft to try out Minetest or it’s fork Voxelands. Both are open source, infinite voxel sandbox games that are currently available for Fedora.
Minetest is currently being developed on and is fairly simplistic without adding mods, it does have the main game mechanics of gathering resources, crafting and building structures. There are a range of Mods available to add functionality as well as texture packs to customise your experience. Minetest is available now in Fedora from the Software application, or using the command line
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Voxelands is a fork of Minetest that implements a wide range of additional functionalty that is either not available in Minetest, or is only available using Mods. It adds features such as mobs and farming. Voxelands is available for Fedora from this COPR repo.
Kurt Kugel
The blog post at https://thomas-leister.de/open-source/linux/microsoft-minecraf/ (German) claims that Minetest itself is mostly just an engine and that the proper game based on Minetest is Voxelands http://voxelands.com/
Ryan Lerch
Thanks Kurt! Didnt know about the Minetest fork, Voxelands! I updated the post to cover both!
Matthew Miller
Minetest now also has a “proper game”, at least to some degree. This is a separate upstream source package (“minecraft_game”) but it’s packaged together in Fedora. I’m going to get my kids to do a compare-and-contrast review. 🙂
Ryan Lerch
oh so the thing we get in Fedora when installing the “minetest” package in fedora is in fact what the upstream calls the “minetest_game” ?
Matthew Miller
It’s a little confusing. Our package contains both, in one RPM. Basically, “games” are pre-packaged sets of mods meant to function overall as a “proper game” in some way. There is a default one, called “minetest_game” and which shows up in the GUI as just “minetest”. When you start a new world, you can choose either that or the “minimal default”, which is effectively no game.
You can also download other games like Dwarves. We should look at packaging up some of these and some of the more important stand-alone mods like mesecons. And maybe we could package the default game separately and use the new rpm “suggests” feature to pull it in normally but allow it to be removed.
Matthew Miller
If you’re finding Minetest to be a little bit on the crashy side (for example, when searching for mods), it’s probably this bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1143774