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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: February 13th, 2025

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  • You make games and they are available for people to play, or is there a difference I’m missing?

    That’s pretty good summary of Luanti.

    The interesting nuance is that Luanti was originally built as the engine for making a faithful Minecraft clone, so the two popular Minecraft clones are extremely faithful to Minecraft, in ways that a clone built in another engine could not be.


  • But can also choose username, so can bypass blacklist.

    I think I recall getting around this by hard-configuring the allowed players list?

    I never felt the need to work hard to disconnect from Minecraft’s auth servers - but I think I remember doing some command line foo once when the Minecraft auth servers were down for a day, in order to let current players keep playing.

    Anyway, all that to say, I think are ways to work around that. It’s not ideal, but probably manageable.

    Disclaimer: I host Luanti now, instead, so I don’t remember all of my Minecraft-foo.



  • For an all-in-one playthrough, the two most popular are VoxelLibre and Mineclonia.

    I perosnally prefer to roll my own mod set, but starting with a couple of mod packs.

    One difference versus Minecraft - when I tried to play Luanti, I thought I needed to keep to just a few mods, to avoid conflicts or lag. I was wrong.

    Mods feel way more efficient in Luanti, and almost never clash with each-other. I was able to go to town adding dozens of mods, on six year old PC hardware without any GPU.


  • I tried minetest long ago and was not particularly impressed.

    Until a the last couole of years, it wasn’t terribly impressive. It is, now.

    Has the community grown big enough?

    That’s a tough question. Minecraft is 3 of the 10 most poplar games of all time. (Measuring every version of Minecraft separately, several versions will crack most “Top 10” lists.)

    So compared to Minecraft, the Luanti community is tiny.

    But compared to other Indie games, it feels like Luanti is huge now.



  • Luanti sucks in modding support compared to minecraft.

    I’m surprised to hear that was your experience

    Modding means something very different in Luanti, and is a first class citizen.

    Trees are a mod. The base game left them out, so we can mod in how we want “the concept of trees” to behave.

    Luanti mods cannot override game code, so the patches to the game code are impossible with mods.

    I get you didn’t enjoy it, but I think your comment misleads others.

    The vast majority of the code in any Luanti game is in the mods. The last 5% is in the game engine, which itself can still be swapped out, as needed.

    Having modded both games extensively, Luanti was a breathe of fresh air, to me.

    Due to this limitation, even the basic things like custom controls or shader support cannot be added using mods.

    I don’t care about shaders, so I cannot comment. Since Luanti manages mod sharing - keeping all clients in sync - maybe that creates challenges? Feels worth it to me.

    As for custom controls, the Luanti mods on my server have plenty of custom controls, so I don’t know what you experienced? Maybe support wasn’t there when you tried it before?


  • Personally, while I prefer Luanti (it is so much easier to mod and host and play), I don’t feel that Launti has reached parity with Minecraft’s best mods.

    That said, it is really close, and really down to subjective preference at this point.

    If you love trains, I think Minecraft comes up short, compared to Advanced Trains on Luanti.

    If you love Redstone programming - actually, MeseCraft fixes so many poor early choices that Redstone is stuck with.

    But if you love advancing through technology ages, you only have one or two good options in Luanti, whereas I think Minecraft has at least half a dozen - and I think the best Minecraft ones are easily better than the best Luanti ones…for now.


  • What actually is this?

    Luanti is the engine that MineClonia runs on, and Mineclonia is a full featured, finished, Minecraft clone.

    The Website is rather unhelpful.

    Seriously. It’s a little sad.

    Its just a Minecraft clone?

    For practical purposes, it absolutely is. Grab Luanti for free off of F-Droid or any Linux app store, or out of the SteamDeck Desktop “Software Center”. Launch “Luanti”, choose “Mineclonia”.

    Pick a username to “Register” (local play is identical to server play) and start playing free open, wonderful, easily modded, multiplayer Minecraft clone.

    If a friend wants to join, just give them your IP address - even on SteamDeck or Android phone.