Minetest suffers from the same thing most open source projects suffer from; it’s “good enough” for a programmer to enjoy.
It just doesn’t have the polish to compare to the real thing.
Great you can add mods, but there are a million little ‘attention to detail’ things that don’t exist, or won’t exist.
As a game dev, I have to say this kind of criticism is too vague to be of any use
Things like horrible lighting engine, textures that were made by an amateur which lack depth, horrible world generation with lack of the types of layering that MC uses, the requirement to MOD it before it hits feature-for-feature parity, and even then, badly.
The reason why my feedback is vague, is because I would probably write a dozen pages worth of shit. It’s one of those ‘death by a thousand papercuts’ situations. The little things add up to the whole thing just feeling like shit. Movement, acceleration, graphics, world generation, UI elements, the barebones nature of the freshly installed game, textures that repeat HEAVILY, shadow-pop-in, chunk pop-in, fog, I could go on for days.
So you installed Minetest Game, the modding base, with no mods and are mad it’s not Minecraft, got it. Minetest Game isn’t about cloning MC, it’s about building your own game out of mods. If you want a Minecraft clone, that’s what Voxelforge and Mineclonia are for.
Personally I couldn’t care less – I don’t like Minecraft (and am not a big fan of Minetest Game either) and am far more interested in original voxel games that are not joined at the hip to bad design decisions made by Notch and/or Microsoft just because Minecraft did it. (Looking at you, crafting grid)
It isn’t suppose to be Minecraft. It is a separate game engine with lots of games and mods
Then why is the title “Why I prefer Minetest to Minecraft”?
Because that’s the exact comparison being made here. It’s built to emulate minecraft. To say it’s not is a bald-faced lie. This excuse is constantly used when people point out how terrible it replicates the thing it’s clearly trying to replicate.
You can’t just use this excuse when people point out how bad it is. You can’t even pretend it’s better, because it really just isn’t.
It initially started as Minetest clone but it hasn’t tried to be one for many years. There are mods that try but not all of them do. There are a lot of mods and games for it on contentdb.
The video doesn’t say that Minetest is a Minecraft clone. The title doesn’t say that either. You can prefer chess to checkers without checkers being a chess clone.
Also with that same logic you could say Minecraft is just a Infiniminer clone. For that matter you could argue that any voxel based game is a Infiniminer clone. Think Veloren, cube world, Roblox and the like.
Edit:
I also forgot to mention that Minetest predates Minecraft (Minecraft is from 2011 and Minetest is from 2010)
I love this dude. I discovered a lot of great mods from him. Also the best thing for me about Minetest, is taking a break then checking the contentDB for recently added mods, one of my personal favorites is https://content.minetest.net/packages/Sumianvoice/item_physics/, which “Makes items lay flat on the ground and not spin.”.
Also there comes a point where you start looking into modifying mods, and then making them.
At this point, Minecraft just feels incredibly overloaded to me. They’ve been adding more and more stuff, mainly because it looks good in press releases and because part of their community hardly does anything else than discuss the latest news.
That much stuff just gives me choice paralysis, and I find it makes it harder to achieve a common aesthetic between builds.
Not to mention the many overlooked things like quality of life updates, the inventory management system needs a serious rework, which is why I ALWAYS download a backpack mod or more chest types, at some point (and this especially true for modern Minecraft) you are gonna end up with a LOT of blocks.
I was so happy when I discovered that the unified_inventory mod already includes a backpack system.
Also I love Minecraft, been playing it since 2016.
