After all, as a game, Minecraft has grown to the point where it is irreplaceable. That is, it was intended to be a voxel game engine rather than just a clone that could replace Minecraft. Thankfully, Minetest has positioned itself as a free, open-source 3D voxel game engine, which is very suitable and potential.

There’s no doubt that Minetest was inspired by Minecraft, and currently many of its users have been copying the gaming experience of Minecraft in many ways. In addition, Minetest supports developing mods using the Lua scripts, and can be extended with additional modules to add more options. But because Minetest is open-source, it has more freedom than Minecraft, so that players/developers can come up with wild ideas at the source level. The game allows players to explore the world and use their imagination and creativity to build anything they want. The common and greatest features of both are open game world and very high degree of freedom. In Minetest, you can play one of their many games, mod a game to your liking, make your own game, or play on a multiplayer server. Of course, for the common users, you can simply think of it as an alternative/clone to Minecraft with a more open and free world. Minetest is not just a standalone sandbox building game, but a handy and friendly game development tool. It’s available for Linux-based systems, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac, and Android platforms, and provides an API for users to create their own games and mods written in Lua. It was created by Perttu Ahola and first released in 2010, and is now developed by a team of volunteers, with significant contributions from the community. Although their interface, style, and gameplay are almost the same, Minetest is essentially a free, open-source and cross-platform voxel game engine (written in C++ and Lua, using the Irrlicht Engine). When you first launched Minetest, didn’t you think it was just Minecraft? Actually not.

Minecraft voxel map source code