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In-game Texture Creation
Mods that allow users to create textures for items/nodes/entities at runtime
Packages
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Bushy Leaves
Makes leaves render bushy instead of boxy.
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Mcl Lever Status Indicator
Makes levers in the “on” position have a red tip in MineClone2/MineClone5/Mineclonia
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Mcl Mushrooms 3D
Renders small mushrooms as 3D objects in MineClone2/MineClone5/Mineclonia
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Mcl Polished Stone Stairs
Adds polished stone stairs to MineClone2/MineClone5/Mineclonia
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Mcl Quick Harvest & Replant
Harvest and replant crops with one right-click in MineClone2/MineClone5/Mineclonia
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Oddly Sized Checkerboard Testnodes 2
Adds oddly sized checkerboard test nodes.
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Studs
Adds studs on top of many nodes that are not ground content. This makes the decorated nodes look like interlocking bricks, similar to LEGO.
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TGA Encoder
A TGA Encoder written in Lua without the use of external Libraries.
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Unicode Text
This library can be used to render UTF-8 encoded Unicode text to a texture (e.g. with tga_encoder). It is intended to be used from code that needs to render in-game signs.
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Xcam
Adds a command to take in-game photos.
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Xmaps
Adds map items that show terrain in HUD
Unfinished, but beautiful.
The basic gameplay is still about as boring as vanilla
Minetest Game… but world generation details, node textures, models, all the parts ofParity of the Minor Bearing [alpha]that seem actually finished just look incredible. The crafting interface still needs some work, but already offers the simplicity ofRepixture. If this is what passes for ”unpolished and jank”, Sumianvoice (the author) has admirable standards. I like the explicit anti-grind stance in the README a lot!Nevertheless … I can not recommend this game, simply because of the author's warning:
Other game and mod developers, take note: This is what being honest to users looks like.
@Sumianvoice I hope you finish this. When/if you do, I plan to adjust my review.
The item magnet tool picks up all items in range when used.
The
item_magnetmod adds the item magnet, a tool craftable with 5 lumps of iron in a ”V” shape ifMinetest Gameis installed.Using the item magnet picks up all items inside the configured radius instantly and adds wear if anything was picked up.
When you want to blow up part of the world using TNT, the item magnet is useful to gather the remains.
This mod becomes much more useful in games in which dug nodes drop as items.
Beautiful texture pack with a clean and consistent look!
This texture pack is one of my favourites. It contains clean and bright (but not too bright) textures with a consistent look that makes great use of straight lines. The textures mostly seem like they belong together – and some textures even look amazing on their own, like the active furnace.
The only improvement I can imagine right now would need bumpmapping support in Minetest to support this style more – especially the carpet, leaves and wood textures strongly imply a three-dimensional surface structure but can not actually present that look without engine support.
Works as advertised, but I do not recommend it!
This mod adds “ghost” nodes that look like normal dirt or glass but have no collision box.
While it seems to work perfectly on a technical level, I think that is just bad game design.
Yes, nodes like these make it possible to prank other players. No, I do not find that funny.
Probably the most advanced signs mod!
As the creator of the
unicode_textmod thatucsignsuses I may be a bit biased, but this is exactly the kind of signs mod that I madeunicode_textfor.As the description correctly states, with this mod you can have text on signs that Minetest can not even render in its interface using the fonts it comes with. As this includes the text input fields that players use to write on signs, this mod is best used with the standard font set to GNU Unifont and the fallback font set to GNU Unifont Upper. This font combination does not account for any CSUR glyphs, but it seems to be a limitation of Minetest that users can not stack an arbitrary amount of fallback fonts.
In the case that users find it difficult to input some Unicode characters, one can use
ucsignsto create a mod that translates ASCII sequences into Unicode (or CSUR) characters. An example of this is cora'ssitelen_pona_signsmod which uses a simple translation table to let users input ASCII syllables that are then transformed to sitelen pona CSUR codepoints, so that signs show sitelen pona glyphs instead.High quality animal mod!
Mobs in
Animaliaare smoothly animated and fit the basic Minetest experience. In contrast to other complex mobs mods, none of them seem to be too weird – e.g. they are neither very big nor very small. The models and textures ofAnimaliafollow a consistent style, and mobs interact with each other in ways that make sense, e.g. owls hunt rats.I have noticed more occasional performance issues with
Animaliathan with some other mods that provide less sophisticated animal mobs. I rarely experienced more than an mild framerate drop from time to time when playing Minetest in singleplayer mode though. Therefore I suspect calculating nice mob behaviour is computationally expensive in some ways.I suggest to install the
Leadsmod alongAnimaliato tether domesticated animals to fenceposts.Nice mob!
Upon spawning or occasionally afterwards, a mime mob disguises itself as a node or entity that is close to it. The disguise is almost perfect for nodes (as entities are not shaded exactly like nodes … players can still figure out which sand or dirt node is really a mime) and perfect for non-animated entities. When copying animated entities though, mimes do not mimic the idle animations – they stand perfectly still instead. That sheep statue over there? Yep, that's a mime in disguise.
When attacking, a mime mob shoots globs of glue that can disorient and immobilize (and possibly drown?) a player. Once a player got out of the glue, a mime may have changed its disguise again. Fortunately, mimes are easy to kill if a player can dodge their glue attacks.
Create rope structures and tether animals to players and fences!
The
Leadsmod allows players to create interesting rope structures: Using the lead on two different fence nodes creates a rope connection between them. To use theLeadsmod with mobs you need a mod that adds mobs, likeAnimalia. Right click a mob with the lead to tether it to yourself and then right click a fence node to tether the mob to a fence. In both cases, you can click an existing lead to destroy it.A mob tethered using a lead is slowly drawn towards the object it is tethered to, if it does not move against that direction fast enough. Additionally, leads seem to have a maximum length and can break if overextended. In gameplay terms this means that players can only tether slow animals permanently: While
Animaliacows and sheep and even frogs are easy to tether permanently, owls eventually break free (e.g. when hunting) and foxes run away fast enough to break the lead almost immediately. Gameplay and lore match here in my opinion; obviously it is easier to tether slow-moving (domesticated) than fast-moving (predatory) animals.Criticism:
This mod adds a lot of animal mobs, they can even fight which each other!
Many animal mobs in
Wilhelmines Animal Worldare territorial – i.e. if they see an animal of a different type they attack them. Mobs can also attack players.Mobs have multiple animations, e.g. for standing, walking, attacking. Usually the mobs move a bit slow (even when attacking), but that seems normal for Minetest mobs.
The mod also adds trophies that look like they are made out of hunted and killed animal mobs, e.g. a decorative bear head.
I noticed one bug: Some animal mobs seem to drop an item to spawn a new one when they die. Dropping spawn items destroys immersion; otherwise the mod is fine.
Not my favourite, but really nice!
The
RPG16texture pack features a lovely and consistent style and not only delivers what was advertised, but exceeds my expectations (set by most other texture packs) in several ways.Each texture looks purpose-made – for example, the icons for similar tools are not just recolorings.
Caveat: Textures look both brighter and a bit less saturated than in most other texture packs.
The brightness is why this texture pack is not my default texture pack; I find it too joyful.
Works exactly as advertised!
I used this mod to successfully have Animalia mobs spawn in the world of Backrooms Test.
Unfortunately, it did not fit mood-wise, since Animalia mobs are peaceful and also spawn in groups.
I appreciate the effort though; “glue mods” like this one are both needed and often under-appreciated.
Clever implementation, small visual bug, otherwise perfect!
Not only does this mod do what it says, it manages to put the carpet node and the stair node into the same space visually.
This means that players can remove the stairs after placing the carpet to create carpet-only stairways with this technique.
As a result of the trickery, placing a node directly above the carpet does not work; it gets placed one node-height higher.
I found a single rendering bug: The corner stair carpet partially overlaps the corner stairs; this overlap leads to z-fighting.
Nice start, but needs improvements before I would recommend it
The idea to make nodes smaller by making the player bigger seems nice.
This game design choice makes non-cuboid nodes like stairs and slabs largely unnecessary.
The inventory is innovative: You can click on a colored node in inventory to see nodes in various shapes that have that color.
Several things do not work well. If all of those were fixed, I would recommend the game:
Great mod, but has problems with glass slabs
This mod is pretty nice and works as advertised, mostly.
When I tried using glass slabs, it revealed several issues:
Nice addition to normal rails
This mod does exactly what the description promises.
The copper rails look a bit weird sometimes because they do not connect to normal rails.
Copper rail curves do not work; if you want to connect two copper rail lines at a 90 degree angle, you have to place a normal rail node in the corner.
Subtle and clever
Placing a large brick node next to a large brick node horizontally creates the appearance of a brick that is two nodes wide and one node high.
This effect is subtle and looks quite nice with walls that are several nodes high.
Bizarre color choices, intentionally limited palette
This texture pack contains some bizarre color choices, in particular regarding wood:
Edit: The colors are intentionally setup like that. According to the author, this texture pack is a joke and intentionally made to look bad. The following criticism does not apply anymore since the author fixed it, but I am keeping it here for posterity, since the discussion below this comment makes little sense without the context:
Works fine in singleplayer, could use more legs though
The leg boat can walk and it looks really nice how this is done.
The leg boat can climb well – but looks a bit silly while doing it.
Entirely unlike what you might expect, the leg boat does not float.
I would like this mod even more if the boat had some more legs (six?).
Also I have noticed a bug: Sometimes part of a leg is black while climbing.
Nice game, but Mineclonia is better!
Edit 2023-11-30: Mineclonia is a fork of MineClone2 with more Minecraft-like features that uses much less RAM. Mineclonia runs on devices on which MineClone2 crashes, only lacking music and the hamburger (which is not in Minecraft).
MineClone2 replicates Minecraft gameplay. It mostly works. Yet, I can not recommend the game, because of questionable dev practices.
Reasons:
Items turn into other items in new versions: Lapis (a rare gem) items turned into blue dye (made from flowers). In a refactoring item names got shuffled, and the devs did not understand item aliases; the fix was to add a recipe to make lapis from blue dye and disable crafting blue dye from flowers.
Texture names change: Texture packs and mods that depends on MineClone2 texture names break in new versions. Textures had stable file names originally, but the dev team put all files in one folder instead of mod's texture folders, with filenames prefixed with mod names. Whenever this is done, it breaks every usage of a texture file name in texture packs and other mods, which then need to be updated.
Mods are ill-defined and often tightly coupled: New functionality is often added to an existing mod, even if it only makes sense from an aesthetic and not from an architecture point of view. When functionality is rewritten in an incompatible way, in MineClone2 the new implementation often keeps the mod name. This makes it impossible to depend on the presence of certain features. You can not depend on the presence of crying obsidian, as it was added to mcl_core instead of being made its own mod – while the respawn anchor implementation was added to mcl_beds.
I believe the reason for all of these decisions is the same: Contributions are generally valued – even if they are so awful that doing nothing would yield a better experience for players and creators of texture-packs and third-party mods.
On your very own sky island, everything is your own fault.
Many other games give the player endless excuses for lacking skill:
Players can thus blame random happenstance. The truth is, obviously, that in these cases, the fault lies with the player:
“NodeCore Skyhell” is so unlike all these games that as the player it is extremely difficult to blame anyone else for your skill issues.
As kimapr pointed out on IRC a while ago this is a different kind of hard than Exile, because in Exile you can blame the environment.
TL;DR: If you think NodeCore is too forgiving and you like knowing that everything is your own fault, give NodeCore Skyhell a try.
Edit: I would appreciate if the person who rated this review as not helpful would tell me why they thought so.
Best way I know to create schematics for your own mods
This mod makes it possible to save and load areas in a Minetest world as schematic files. With it players can build structures in Minetest and save the result to a file in their world folder.
The mod is easy to understand and does not depend on any game – not even
minetest_game. In my opinion that makes it an excellent choice to create schematics, even for beginner mod developers. There even exist special nodes for common use cases – for example, when air should not be placed in a schematic.Saving a schematic:
schems, which is located in the folder of the world you created it in.Loading a schematic:
schems, which should be located in the folder of the world you want it to be in. (Create it if it does not exist.)Mod is way too buggy
I have tested this mod with Mineclonia and can not recommend it.
This seemed true at first glance. The movement blocking felt a bit too jerky though.
When I entered a new world with this mod, I found no obsidian marker, but a bunch of server errors showed up during map generation.
The second time I entered that world, I did find an obsidian border. I assume that the placement code should wait until mapgen is done.
Mined nodes outside the spawn chunk are immediately restored, but since the nodes drop as items, this means that players have an infinite supply of everything that they can mine, which makes resource gathering absurdly easy. It is also trivial to move outside of the chunk with a boat, to explore the world and gather literally limitless resources; upon exiting the boat, the player is teleported back to the spawn chunk.
Nice idea, disappointing execution
I really like the concept; I thought this mod could provide some kind of “undo” for when I craft more than I need.
Then I crafted 4 tree into 16 wood, put it into the decrafting bench and got 2 wooden slabs.
Then I put 4 sandstone blocks in the decrafting bench and got 2 sandstone slabs.
Then 2 bronze blocks turned into 2 bronze slabs and saw the pattern.
Misleading name: The chest does not contain everything!
The name is wrong: This mod only adds a chest with creative inventory items.
There exists a setting to make the chest contain everything. It is off by default.
I wasted several minutes of my life with this mod because of a useless default.
Works as advertised!
Note: This mod works well with MineClone2 / MineClone5 / Mineclonia.
It is not needed there though – the waterlily node has the same purpose.
Nice mod to play with algorithmically generated structures
It seems to me that the “Run your first program” instructions must be done after the “Write your first program” instructions to avoid a crash.
Note that several of the examples do not work if your world does not have the mods
vector3andworldedit.Why is this mod not available for Minetest 5.5+?
Very challenging, unusual and deep game mechanics
I have encountered no other Minetest game yet that felt so much like a survival challenge.
In Exile, simply not dying all the time means that a player is doing something right.
Building an actual house is a challenge – I managed to live in a tiny cave.
Survival tip: Stay warm and make sure you have drinking water.
Very weird usage, but overall okay
This mod basically works by overriding day/night ratio for the player who uses it. This means that the sun and moon do still move, it is just light or dark permanently.
The mod uses the
/ptimecommand to do three things:Enter the command repeately to cycle between the modes.
A possible improvement for this mod would be for the
/ptimecommand to take a parameter, like/ptime dayor/ptime nightor/ptime disable. That way users would no longer have to guess what the command will do.Interesting gameplay change, crashes with fire and TNT
This changes how Minetest works in an interesting way. I suggest to try it out!
I found the following issues with Minetest Game that show that this mod needs work:
Cool idea, but not enough of a timesaver
The stair pick idea is nice, However, I was not able to create corner stairs or upside down stairs. This means I actually do have to craft and place stairs, which I wanted to avoid.
There is a slight visual flicker when a node is turned into a stair. I think this happens because the node is being removed before it is placed. Since the code is old (2013), I assume that back then it might have been necessary, but nowadays I would use
minetest.set_node()to get flicker-free stair picking.Looks good but slows down map generation enormously with default settings
This mod created server lag with default naturalslopeslib settings, on an 8-core machine. IMO these should be adjusted accordingly.
If interacting with the world in singleplayer mode becomes extremely laggy with this mod active, change the naturalslopeslib settings:
Changing “Generation Method” to “Progressive” lead to a non-laggy game. You can also disable “Shape update on generation” to fix this.
Better gameplay for cave explorers!
I tried this mod out and did not expect much from such relatively simple changes to lighting mechanics.
Then, while playing Minetest, I was amazed how much nicer cave exploration felt with a wielded torch.
Cute tech demo. Previous version took ages to load, but that is now fixed!
This mod makes the world a lot more literal.
Long node names are hard to read though; the mod should use line breaks.
This mod slowed loading the game a lot. This was fixed and I can recommend it now.
Part of my earlier critcism is still relevant and there was a conversation, so my previous review can be read below. Note that I have since put the mod
tga_encoderon ContentDB, which makes it trivial to generate textures for Minetest <5.5.This mod does exactly what the description says.
However, it contains three technical flaws:
First, textures are regenerated every time a world is loaded. This is wasteful and not necessary. This is probably what makes it very slow. Second, textures are given via the texture modifier [png. This is wasteful and does not degrade gracefully in older versions. Third, textures are generated as RGBA, even though they are simple monochrome bitmaps.
Here is how I would fix those:
First, write the textures to the filesystem instead of using the [png texture modifier. Second, generate the text textures only if they do not exist on the filesystem yet. Third, use TGA as the file format (~20 bytes header, dump pixels, write footer).
This should result in a mod that is much faster and also compatible with older Minetest versions.
Excellent mod!
This mod makes ore nodes, e.g. iron ore, drop ore beans instead of themselves when dug. Raw ores can be smelted into bars, e.g. smelting raw iron ore beans results in an iron bar. Also 9 raw ore beans can be crafted into a raw iron ore beann node players can build with.