## Introduction Luanti has joined Open Collective Europe (OCE), a non-profit based in Belgium that provides fiscal hosting to open source projects. OCE hosts many notable projects, including EndeavourOS, F-Droid, and postmarketOS. Joining OCE allows Luanti to operate like a non-profit and unlocks many new opportunities. You can donate to Luanti’s non-profit collective at https://opencollective.com/luanti. ## Why Open Collective Europe? It has long been a goal to set Luanti up as a non-profit organization. However, creating and managing a non-profit entity is both time-consuming and expensive. Non-profit fiscal hosts allow projects to raise money like a non-profit, but without the overhead of managing a full non-profit organization themselves. We chose Open Collective Europe because it is well-respected and is based in Europe (like much of the Luanti organization). Open Collective Europe also uses the Open Collective platform for fundraising and expenses, which provides a high level of transparency. If we decide to set up a full non-profit organization in the future, we will still be able to transfer any balance from Open Collective Europe to the new organization. Open Collective Europe is equivalent to a US 501(c)3 non-profit. This means it is a charity for public benefit and can receive grants from US foundations. Donations to Luanti from US-based individuals and foundations may be tax-deductible. ## How has Luanti been funded in the past? There are many hidden expenses behind Luanti, such as servers for hosting essential services like the server list, ContentDB, and the forums. So far, these expenses have been paid by the responsible staff members, some of whom accept donations to cover their costs. Luanti has also had a stand at FOSDEM 2024 and 2025. Attending FOSDEM costs us roughly €3000 each year in merchandise, promotional materials, travel, and accommodations. Some of this money was raised by rubenwardy via private support, while the rest was from other non-profit organizations (Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation, Italian Linux Society, and Wikimedia Italy) agreeing to pay expenses. Joining OCE relieves the individual burden of fundraising and covering costs. ## What are our plans for the future? ### Promoting Luanti and bringing the community together We are hoping to return to FOSDEM with a stand in 2026, and would also like to arrange a small Luanti meetup that Saturday. We may also use donations to fund local meetups, hackathons, and other conferences. ### Supporting development Open Collective Europe allows us to pay people as freelancers. One day, we would love to have a full-time developer working on Luanti. In the short-term, we may pay specialists such as a UI/UX designer or a user researcher to work on the main menu. Being part of a non-profit also allows us to apply for certain grants available for open source software, which could be used to fund feature development. ### Transparency and community involvement We welcome community involvement with the new collective. If you have any thoughts or ideas, feel free to share them. The Open Collective platform makes all contributions and expenses public. We’ll also post a yearly update summarizing our finances. We are currently in the process of creating governance and expenditure polices. If you have experience with this or know of people or projects that do, we welcome your input. ## How much of my donation goes to Luanti? From the Open Collective Europe docs: > Open Collective Europe charges a standard **administrative fee** : > > * **8%** for most contributions (plus card processing fees) > * 1.5% + €0.25 for European cards > * 2.5% + €0.25 for non-European cards > * **10%** if your Collective: > * Receives a **grant or sponsorship** > * Receives a **tax-deductible donation** > * Receives a **public subsidy** > * Receives a **manual bank transfer** > The administration fees go to the Open Collective Europe foundation to cover their overheads. Part of the fees go to the Open Collective platform. We would likely lose more than 10% if we were to manage our own non-profit organization, so we believe this is fair. ## How can I support Luanti? You can donate to Luanti’s non-profit collective at https://opencollective.com/luanti.

## Introduction **55** Pull Requests merged | **53** Issues resolved | **132** Commits ---|---|--- 5.14.0 has landed following the return of release candidates! Quality-of-life features and performance improvements are the name of the game this time around. You can download Luanti from our website, check out the code on GitHub, or read the full changelog. ## Table of Contents * Release Candidates and Schedule * UI and Client Improvements * Particulate Additions * Mapblocks and Textures * Documentation, API Features, and Bugfixes * What’s Next? ## Release Candidates and Schedule If you weren’t aware, we try to create release candidates before every new version to test changes. This was forgotten for our last two releases but has now returned. If you would like to test features before everyone else gets them, check out our releases on GitHub a couple weeks before each release. When does each release happen? We follow a 3-month cycle starting in January. That means a new version in January, April, July, and October. You can find more information in the documentation. ## UI and Client Improvements A handful of conveniences for players made their way into this release. Starting off in the main menu, clarity has been improved with world-related options now being hidden when no world is selected (#16414). In menu and game text fields, you can now select whole words at a time with `ctrl+shift+left/right`, following common convention (#16455). Moving in-game, the minimap HUD element will render `overlay_tiles` correctly, as opposed to rendering the base tile colors (#16285). If you need to recall a conversation later, you can now find chat messages logged to `debug.txt` (#14289). Finally, a new API feature has been added to allow nametags to scale by distance, making it easier to tell who’s nearby and who isn’t (#16267). Note that the exact scaling behavior is not perfect and may change in the future. Grass on minimap in Devtest before and after ## Particulate Additions Improvements for particles have spawned across the board this release. For players, digging particles will now appear for everyone, not just you! (#16472) Unless you don’t want particles to show up, in which case a flag has been added to particle spawners to exclude specified players (`f714ac0`). And if you intend to send a bunch of individual particles at once, the network will be happier now that individual particle packets are batched (#16458). ## Mapblocks and Textures Now we dive deeper into the depths of the engine. The effects of this first one aren’t totally certain, but hopefully mapblock generation is more stable now that blocks will not unload while generating (#16339). More concretely, mapblocks made of a single type of node (like air or stone) will only have the memory footprint of a single node instead of a whole mapblock (#16293). This is consistent with how they are stored on the disk. Speaking of storage, textures should now load faster with paths being cached (`55cca34`). On the API side of things, dynamic media now has a flag for caching media on the client (#16445). The `ephemeral` flag documentation has been updated for accuracy. ## Documentation, API Features, and Bugfixes Speaking of documentation, did you know that you have to remove the ColorSpec from `box` elements if you want to `style]` their color? No? Well, that’s because it wasn’t documented until now (#16438). That, and some clarification on entity `stepheight` limits ([#15035). You will also find some new features documented: * New `node` and `timeout` parameters for `on_timer` callback (`fd3588d`) * `core.strip_escapes()` (#16485) * `AsyncJob:cancel()` (#14602) Bone interpolation for `obj:set_bone_override` has been fixed, preventing some silly animation issues (#16427). And in case you wonder where interlaced 3D mode went: It has left the building. Apparently it has been non-operational since 5.7.0 (#15406). Silly bone animations (credit: JasonTable) ## What’s Next? Take a look at the pull request list to see what the community and developers are working on! Some neat features in the works include inventory image animations, changeable ABMs, non-cubic chunks, and a dark mode main menu theme. Everyone is welcome to contribute to Luanti! Questions? Ideas? Feel free to get involved!

## Introduction **68** Pull Requests merged | **49** Issues resolved | **134** Commits ---|---|--- This release is a little smaller than usual due to the previously-mentioned schedule shift, but 5.13.0 still has quite a few new things for developers to play with, as well as plenty of bug fixes. You can download Luanti from our website, check out the code on GitHub, or read the full changelog. ## Table of Contents * Persistent Object IDs * Working with Nodes * Show Them Their Inventory * A Couple of Controls * Bugs-B-Gone * What’s Next? ## Persistent Object IDs Let’s start with the big one: Object IDs! Why is this important? You see, before persistent object IDs, developers had to track unloaded entities and objects manually using staticdata or other gross tricks. With #14135, the engine provides `Object:get_guid()`, returning a globally unique identifier that will remain consistent across unloads and world sessions until the entity is destroyed. Never lose track of your objects ever again! ## Working with Nodes Here’s a handful of methods you can use when working with nodes and chunks. * `core.get_node_raw()` to query nodes from the map, but faster, and with a content ID (#16265) * `VoxelManip:initialize()` to create an empty VM storage object (aa1bab2) * `core.get_mapgen_chunksize()` to determine the configured chunksize for your custom mapgens (#16289) Handy, no? ## Show Them Their Inventory It might not seem significant, but manually pulling up a player’s inventory has been a long-requested feature. Now, by passing an empty string (`""`, reserved for the player inventory) as the formname to `core.show_formspec()`, you can open the player’s inventory without their input (#15963). The inventory formspec is smoother when updating after input so mods can create forms that update with less flow interruption. I bet this could be used in some creative ways… ## A Couple of Controls Firstly, you can now cycle through inventory tabs using `ctrl+tab` (`+shift` to cycle in reverse). This is a standard keybind for application tab switching, so we are happy to see it arrive in Luanti (#16167). Secondly, the keybind modifier for exiting to the main menu is configurable (#16250). `ESC` plus whatever you desire. More importantly, it is no longer set by default, preventing players from accidentally leaving the game due to pressing `Shift+ESC` during quick movements. Now you can play CTF in (relative) peace. ## Bugs-B-Gone The ~~exterminators~~ developers have been hard at work making Luanti more stable and consistent. You may be happy to learn that a plethora of issues have been resolved regarding: * 9-slice image button rendering (#16146) * Animated world-aligned texture rendering (#16091) * Broken keybinds (#16049) * Lagging bone attachments and animation blending (#14722) * Menu freezing on world join (#16303) * `verticalframe` transparency ([158bfa6) * Particlespawner crashes (#16351) ## What’s Next? Back to the 3-month intervals. By the time 5.14.0 lands, you might see camera color effects, matrix and rotation APIs, glTF morph animations, animated inventory images, and more! Questions? Ideas? Feel free to get involved!

## Introduction Luanti 5.12.0 is here! Perfectly on schedule, we swear! Anyway, this time Luanti is sporting new input handling and controls, new item and entity visuals, better map performance, and more. You can download Luanti from our website, check out the code on GitHub, or read the full changelog. ### Table of Contents * SDL2 Window and Input Handling * Control Your Controls * More Animation, Less Blur, and New Reviews * Camera Mode, Entity Visuals, and More * World and Object Performance * Other Highlights * What’s Next? ## SDL2 Window and Input Handling This section covers a plethora of outstanding issues, so don’t skip this one— SDL is a bigger deal than you might think! Until this release, Luanti relied on Irrlicht’s custom window and input interfaces, which (much like a lot of old Irrlicht code) was _very_ outdated and buggy. SDL, on the other hand, has been consistently updated since 1998 and has been battle-tested by thousands of major applications over the years. Efforts to migrate to SDL2 have been ongoing for a few years now, and 5.12.0 is the first version to finally see those efforts come to fruition. The cross-platform wrappers SDL2 brings have enabled a bunch of cool stuff: * Touchscreen controls are now supported on any touchscreen device (not just mobile) (irr#262, #14146, #14075, others) * Key binding is now based on physical position (scancodes), allowing non-QWERTY keyboards to work out of the box and fixing some platform-specific issues on macOS and others (#14964) * Support for high-DPI screens (#14703) * Desktop IME support for text input on all platforms (helpful for CJK and other languages) (#14942) * Toggle fullscreen with F11 on all platforms (#14714) This also brings reliability and stability to the window and input system, fixing many other long-standing bugs. It will also make it easier to upgrade to SDL3, should we choose to in the future. ## Control Your Controls Speaking of input handling, there have been a handful of control improvements. Keybinds now live in the _Settings_ menu, bringing with it some missing controls and keys (and now benefiting from Lua formspec features). The `sneak` and `aux1` keys are now optionally togglable, saving you from finger strain while running along all those edges. The new keybinding interface For our touchscreen users, dig and place buttons can be enabled instead of using gestures. Touchscreen digging and placing ## More Animation, Less Blur, and New Reviews This time we’ll start with a big one: Animated node textures on the GUI! After all these years, animated node textures are finally displayed in the inventory, hotbar, and hand. Non-node animations coming soon. Animated nodes in the inventory Texture filtering is no longer a blurry mess, softening pixels as intended. Gone are the days of screenshots ruined by bilinear and trilinear filtering! Trilinear filtering before and after (note corners on flowers) Package pages in the content browser now have a _Reviews_ tab where you can see exactly what other users like (or dislike) about that thing you want to download. Also pictured below is the new default flat button style with the 2000s-style gradient removed. These reviews carry a lot of weight! ## Camera Mode, Entity Visuals, and More Are you making a game with an exclusively 3rd-person camera? Need the player to take a good look at themselves? The new `set_camera` player method allows developers to set the current camera mode by force! This method will hopefully expand in the future. The `node` visual type has been introduced to entities to represent any node (instead of hacking the `item` visual til it looks right). initial_properties = { visual = "node", node = { name = "mymod:mynode", param2 = 42, -- It supports paramtypes too! } } Developers can now prevent the `Escape` key from closing their formspecs using the `allow_close[true]` element. The form can still be closed with an exit button or with `Shift + Esc` in emergencies (so don’t rely on your forms being locked open). The `try_quit` event field has also been introduced to watch for close attempts on locked forms. As for notable fixes, custom hands now properly override all tool capabilities. glTF models saw various fixes, most importantly local transforms no longer affect meshes. ## World and Object Performance Alongside better world loading and generation performance, world storage has been changed to save block positions as separate integers instead of a hash. This simpler implementation is much easier to work with internally and for external tools. **Please note:** Worlds created with or migrated to 5.12.0 are **not backward-compatible.** Objects have also seen a storage speed upgrade with a new spatial index, as well as better collision detection. ## Other Highlights * Perlin noise has been renamed to Value noise (old methods are _not yet_ deprecated) (#15858) * `/msg` will echo your sent message back to you like it used to (#15887) * Item registration is now stricter to avoid bad practice (#15912) * Server texture packs have been documented (#15951) * IPv6 is now enabled by default for servers (#15739 🚂) ## What’s Next? 5.13.0 will likely be released a month sooner than normal, so expect a smaller update, but you can still track the work being done on animated items, glTF morph animations, skybox layers, and more. Coming soon to a Luanti version near you! Questions? Ideas? Feel free to get involved!

## Introduction This year marked Luanti’s second consecutive appearance at FOSDEM! Held in Brussels, Belgium, FOSDEM is the largest free and open source software conference in Europe. Fresh off our recent rebranding and new release cycle, FOSDEM was a fantastic opportunity to collect feedback and update people on what’s happening in the Luanti world. The rename did make some logistics a bit tricky (flyers and leaflets needed to be redone), but thanks to some cutting-edge technology, we managed to recycle some material! Our stand at FOSDEM 2025 Speaking of feedback, FOSDEM showed us in a real-life context that renaming was the right choice. Instead of entertaining frequent questions about being a Minecraft clone, we were able to introduce Luanti as a game platform and all the features that came with it. The conference was also a convenient way to update familiars on the new name, with a few “Oh, this was Minetest!” comments throughout. Besides the new name, our demos were also a huge hit with attendees. We were very happy to see the surprise on people’s faces while playing Extra Ordinance by SumianVoice (the winner of the 2024 Luanti Game Jam). For those who hadn’t played any Luanti games for a while, a third-person mech shoot-‘em-up game was simply mind-blowing (give it a try if you haven’t played it yet!). Visitors were also interested in the devices we featured at the booth: rubenwardy’s Steam Deck and a postmarketOS phone (kindly lent by Okias). Kids and adults alike greatly enjoyed their time with the Steam Deck, while more tech-savvy people were fascinated by a mobile Linux device running Luanti games. Luanti on postmarketOS Many adults who stopped by the booth were interested in Luanti as a libre game environment for their kids or students. Parents and teachers were both happy to see what Luanti could do, especially with the smooth and safe integration ContentDB offers for downloading content. Thomas even ran a workshop on Saturday teaching kids and parents how to mod and add content to their games; the kids were amazed when they were able to add dragons from Draconis to their worlds! They also had fun playing minigames together on the A.E.S. server. Many thanks to Haui, a passionate community member who helped cover our booth alongside their partner while we were pulled away to assist with the workshop. FOSDEM Junior workshop - 'Modsoup : Recipe and ingredients - Creating a modpack/gamepack for Luanti/Minetest'. Photo by @[email protected] The Saturday workshop was just a small part of the education theme present this year. rubenwardy and Zughy had a great conversation with Teckids about the workshops they host in Germany, and Zughy was invited to run a few in Italy. Tama McGlinn created AdaBots with Luanti to teach children programming and gave a talk about it as well. And of course, Zughy gave a talk on Sunday about Luanti and showcased some education projects and strategies. FOSDEM Education talk - 'Free your games: Luanti!' The best part of real-life events is, hands down, the people. Many people paid a visit to the Luanti booth, sharing their ideas, projects, inspirations, or simply meeting us in-person after years of knowing them by a nickname on the internet. For instance, Adrian would like to make a to-scale world map in Luanti using OpenStreetMap data; Tama (from earlier) connected bots to the voxel world to teach programming with AdaBots; Markus from CoderDojo helps kids make and 3D print buildings in Luanti; Sylvia plays on Zughy’s Luanti server and had a wonderful conversation with him about possible improvements. Being a free software convention, we got to interact with quite a few people representing various platforms. We were situated next to Homebrew, they renamed the Minetest cask to Luanti live on the stand. Folks from FUTO and NOSTR stopped by to discuss publishing Luanti on their platforms, while the night before FOSDEM two of us grabbed a bite with some Codeberg staff and got to hear about different experiences in the free software ecosystem. Several Luanti core team members also took the opportunity to meet in real life and talk face-to-face. We went for pizza on Saturday evening, joined by the director of the French Institute for Research and Innovation. With full stomachs we had plenty of fuel for a casual meeting that turned out to be very productive, and we even ended up with a new core dev (y5nw) by the night’s end! FOSDEM was a great conference this year and we’re definitely ready to do it again. We hope you had as much fun as we did, and we’re looking forward to meeting you again. We’d also like to thank our sponsors who helped make the whole experience possible. In alphabetical order: Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation, Italian Linux Society, rubenwardy’s sponsors, and Wikimedia Italy.

## Introduction Luanti 5.11.0 is landing right on time following our 3-month release schedule! Many new menu features have arrived alongside font overrides, continued model improvements, rendering fixes, and more. You can download Luanti from our website, check out the code on GitHub, or read the full changelog. ### Table of Contents * Compatibility Changes * In-Game Settings Menu * Touchscreen Layout Editor * More Server List Info * Default Font Overrides * Other Highlights * Onwards and Upwards ## Compatibility Changes There are a few changes which may (or may not) affect you, so we’ll get them out of the way first: * **OpenGL 2.0** is now the minimum OpenGL version required by Luanti (here’s why). * BMP image support has been dropped as it was deprecated in 2023 due to extremely rare use. * A long-standing bug with bone rotations was fixed, which may break some mods that had worked around the issue. In particular, mods overriding bones with 180° rotations (like playeranim) may have issues until fixed. Check your mods, devs! ## In-Game Settings Menu The settings menu can now be accessed from the in-game pause menu (very convenient!). Keep in mind that not every setting supports live changes, so you may still need to reconnect after making certain alterations. The in-game settings menu ## Touchscreen Layout Editor For those of you on smartphones or some other touchscreen device (smartwatch, anybody?), Luanti now includes a layout editor for your on-screen controls. Select `Touchscreen Layout` in the pause menu and organize the buttons to your heart’s content! The touchscreen editor in action ## More Server List Info Have you ever wanted to check server info _before_ you connect? Until now we had to use the online server list, but Luanti has introduced 4 new buttons allowing you to open the server’s website, view its mod list, see which players are online, and manage your favorites. You can also filter your searches by game, mod, or player (see search bar tooltip for specifics). Server list info buttons ## Default Font Overrides Luanti’s fonts are starting to get boring after more than a decade, so mods can now override the defaults! Place TTF or WOFF fonts in your mod’s `fonts` directory for each style you want to override (check out the documentation for more details). This is just the first step towards better font control, so keep an eye out for future font features. Everyone's favorite font family! ## Other Highlights * **Clients’`version_string` is now available** in `core.get_player_information()`, with `core.protocol_versions` added to verify available client features (#15708). * **glTF STEP interpolation** is now supported (#15525). * The chat console has a scrollbar now (#15104). * Some unwanted disconnects have been eliminated (#15680). * Various rendering issues (shadow flicker, overlay Z-fighting, MSAA/bloom artifacts, orbit tilt distortions, and more) have been fixed. ## Onwards and Upwards Development continues with 5.12.0, now at github.com/luanti-org/luanti! You can likely look forward to more visual effects, unique entity IDs, collision improvements, better pause menu settings, and more. Also keep an eye on docs.luanti.org, where we are unifying all Luanti knowledge in one place. Questions? Ideas? Feel free to get involved!

## Introduction Luanti (formerly Minetest) 5.10.0 has been released just three months after 5.9.0 in accordance with the new release schedule. Just in time to be used in the 2024 Luanti Game Jam, too! Highlights include a **content browser redesign** , support for the modern **glTF** model format, gettext translation support, new visual effects, an API for per-player objects, usability improvements, and more. You can download Luanti from our website. As always, the full changelog can be found here. ### Table of Contents * Content Browser Redesign * glTF Support * gettext Translations * Visual Effects * Per-player Objects * More Highlights * Conclusion ## Content Browser Redesign Luanti’s built-in content browser was redesigned to be more user-friendly and appealing, presenting content (mods, games, and texture packs) in a grid. The new content browser grid You can now also view the details for a package, similar to the ContentDB web interface: The new content details view ## glTF Support Until now, Luanti developers had to choose between two antiquated file formats for animated 3D models (`.b3d` and `.x`) which have poor support in modern software and are difficult to work with. Luanti now supports the modern glTF file format, which allows for seamless exports and imports with modeling software such as Blender or Blockbench. It also allows developers to easily drop in freely-licensed glTF assets from the internet. Clients need to be version 5.10.0 or above to see glTF models, and support is still a bit rough around the edges, but feature parity with existing model file formats has already been achieved and better support is planned for the future. ## gettext Translations Luanti finally supports the standard gettext `.po` and `.mo` translation file formats! These formats are much easier to manage via external tools such as Weblate, and also provide more options for translators (such as correct plural forms). The custom `.tr` translation file format is still supported, but we highly recommend migrating to gettext (see Translations API) if you don’t plan to support client versions older than 5.10.0. ## Visual Effects Even more eye candy has arrived for players to enjoy! Among the list of options are simple liquid reflections and waves, translucent foliage, node specular highlights, softer clouds, and tinted shadows. This post’s cover image features these effects. ## Per-player Objects Developers can now control which player(s) an object is sent and shown to with `object:set_observers()`. For example, the Capture The Flag server uses this for nametags which can only be seen by teammates. It could also be used to implement in-world interfaces or displays that only the desired player can see. This implementation is entirely server-side, so only the server needs to be 5.10.0 to support this feature. Clients do not need to upgrade to support this change. ## More Highlights * **Communicate across threads** : The new IPC API allows Luanti server Lua environments to freely share data between all environments (server, async, and mapgen) via a key-value store, making async and mapgen environments more powerful and easier to use. * **Bulk LBMs** let you run loading block modifiers on all the matching node positions in a mapblock at once with the `bulk_action` property. * `get_player_control()` now exposes **joystick direction** (as X and Y axes). This may be especially useful for vehicles or arcade-inspired games. * Mobile users will notice a grid menu in place of the button bar, as well as improved GUI scaling. * Server & content list search now requires all keywords to match. * Smooth scrolling can be toggled with a new setting. ## Conclusion Check out the full changelog for other minor features and bugfixes. Development has resumed on 5.11.0, with work being done on improving moving object performance, custom touchscreen layouts, a new UI API, and more. Feel free to get involved!

“Is this a Minecraft clone? Is it like Minecraft Alpha?” If you’ve been a member of our community for some time, you are probably aware of how often these questions remind us of what people think of when they hear the name “Minetest”: a rip-off of a similar genre-defining game. Truth be told, that was celeron55’s initial plan. But things change, and Minetest evolved. Now, the time has come for Minetest to assume a new identity and prove it has moved beyond its original purpose. ## A Bit of History After seeing Minecraft’s alpha debut, celeron55 “took it as a challenge” to explore “the mystery of how a game world like this works under the hood”1. The name wasn’t very important; it was a test after all— an experiment to see what it could do differently. An experiment that began attracting more users and contributors throughout the years until Minetest eventually evolved from a game to what it is today: a game platform. Through the efforts of the community over the past decade, Minetest has developed a unique identity with an approachable API and easy scripting language, support for community-created games and mods, a central library to easily find community content, and more recently a shift to promoting community creations instead of the original Minetest Game. Despite these advancements, one anachronistic holdover has remained to remind us of the past: an idea that no longer describes the purpose of this project and community— its name. After more than a year of public and internal discussions, that era is over. “Minetest” is no more; the “Minecraft clone” is no more. With great thanks to the community for their input, we wave goodbye to Minetest and introduce a new era. Welcome 🥁 … **Luanti!** ## Luanwhat? “Luanti” is a wordplay on the Finnish word _luonti_ (“creation”) and the programming language ~~Minetest~~ Luanti employs for games and mods, _Lua_. The goal was to avoid yet another plain English word (good luck finding something unique…) and highlight the core principles of the project. The fusion of celeron55’s Finnish nationality and the platform’s focus on content creation resulted in the birth of “Luanti”. We decided to avoid using “free” or “libre” in the name because we don’t think it does the project justice. Luanti will always be free software, but that core principle is not everything it has to offer. Projects like Blender, Krita, or Godot are awesome, and they don’t need to convince you about their libre nature by putting it in their names. They are libre, but they’re also much, much more! Luanti is a lot of things. Many of us are familiar with the voxel nature of the engine and the library of content it supports, and name suggestions related to that idea were certainly plentiful. But describing that in the new name would limit the platform in the same way as the original: users and developers would come to expect it to be an engine exclusive to cube games when it can be more than that. Luanti is a platform that is built to help you create. It’s a platform where anyone can make something. It’s a platform that will keep evolving to support your creations. ## Moving Forward With the new name, a few changes will be made in the engine and community. Obviously, all the repositories and community hubs will adopt the Luanti name in some form. You’ll be able to find the website at luanti.org and repositories at github.com/luanti-org (many old links will redirect). Our social platforms will change similarly. The logo will be staying, and you’ll probably still hear “Minetest” occasionally in reference to Minetest Game which will remain a testament to the project’s roots. Otherwise, Luanti now represents the future of the platform. For developers, the engine won’t actually change much. For those who aren’t aware, `core` is actually the real Lua namespace used internally, `minetest` is just an alias (which we will keep for compatibility). Rather than rename all the namespaces to `luanti`, `core` will be the official namespace to use. It’s shorter to type, easier to remember, and backwards-compatible. It’s also friendlier to forks and future name changes (which we don’t plan to do, promise!) We hope that, free from the ghost of its past, Luanti can bloom into something more and bring life to adventures and experiences for years to come. It can now live and breathe on its own, explore its nature and potential, and overcome its limits. At the very least, we can finally say to those who once asked “Is this a Minecraft clone?”: No, not anymore. It came from humble beginnings and has grown into a powerful game platform where you, and anyone else, can start creating. And with your help, it will continue to grow into something even better. What do you think about the new name? Let us know in the forum thread or on any of our community platforms! * * * ##### Sources: 1. Open source game developer Perttu Ahola talks about Minetest with Wikinews ↩

## Introduction Minetest 5.9.0 has been released with performance improvements for rendering and map generation, new graphical effects, and much more. You can download Minetest from our website. As always, the full changelog can be found here. ### Table of Contents * God Rays * Rendering Performance * Multithreaded Custom Mapgen * Selected Further Highlights * Outlook ## God Rays As part of x2048’s efforts to improve graphics, Minetest now supports “god rays” (also known as “volumetric lighting”), as shown in the cover image. In order to give modders and game developers full artistic control, Minetest lets mods control this feature, leaving it off by default. If some of your installed mods or games do not opt-in to god rays yet, you can install ROllerozxa’s volumetric lighting mod to enable it. Make sure that you have shaders, bloom, and volumetric lighting enabled in settings. ## Rendering Performance There have been improvements to rendering performance, which on some hardware may yield a significant improvement in FPS. Particle rendering performance in particular has been improved dramatically, enabling modders to create much more elaborate particle effects. ## Multithreaded Custom Mapgen Minetest allows mods and games to take control of map generation, ranging from the spawning of custom structures to entirely custom mapgen. Up until now, Lua mapgen code was executed on the same thread as the rest of the game, which would be stalled when running expensive computations. This forced modders to compromise on mapgen features to keep lag manageable. Mods that make use of the new APIs can now take advantage of a separate mapgen thread, enabling more advanced custom mapgen that doesn’t bring the game to a grinding halt. This lays the groundwork for drastic improvements in mapgen performance if multiple cores are available. 1 ## Selected Further Highlights Some further highlights include: * Improved **Android** experience: A short tap is now used to punch entities in-game, making combat much more comfortable. Mods can now control whether they want long or short taps to be used for punching/digging respectively per type of pointed thing (nothing, node or entity). This makes tools like bows or shields usable on mobile. * More flexible **pointability** : Mods can now control which tools can be used to point at which nodes or entities, replacing some janky workarounds modders had to employ until now. Nodes or entities can also block pointing, which is useful for barriers or shields. * The **range** of items can now be changed by mods at runtime via item metadata. * Mods can now register **L-system trees** as decorations. * The **bone override** API has been extended with added support for setting scale, the ability to apply overrides relative to the animation and smooth interpolation of properties, which aids modders in creating smoother procedural animations. * **Wear bar color** is now fully customizable. Rainbow pickaxes can finally get the wear bar they deserve. ## Outlook Development now resumes on 5.10.0, with many awesome features in the works: * There has been work on using **SDL** for input handling and windowing in order to enable cross-platform mouse and keyboard, touchscreen, and gamepad support. This had to be disabled for the 5.9.0 release due to remaining bugs, but interested users can enable it by compiling Minetest themselves. * Support for the more modern **glTF** model file format is in progress, which will hopefully reduce the barrier for bringing animated models to Minetest and aid further graphical improvements. * Even more **graphical effects** are being worked on. * The main menu redesign is progressing with a ContentDB redesign. * “Per-player” entities are in the works. * Customizable touchscreen controls are being implemented. * Two different approaches for long needed performance improvements for entities are being developed and tested. … and many more. Stay tuned for the next release in a few months! * * * 1. Multiple mapgen (“emerge”) threads are already an option, but known to have issues. Use at your own risk. ↩

Improvements are made to graphics, the Lua API, and the user interface. We present the winners of the 2023 Game Jam along with other cool mods. A new core developer joins the team, and we look forward to FOSDEM 2024! * Engine News * 2023 Game Jam Winners * Mods News * Art and Builds * Other News * FOSDEM 2024 * Contributing to Minetest ## Engine News ### New Core Developer The community welcomes longtime community member Lars Müller (aka Luatic, appguru(eu), LMD) (Github, ContentDB), as the newest Core Developer! He has made many contributions to documentation and entities, is currently assisting the effort to introduce the modern glTF model format, and is working on a PR to allow specific entities to be hidden from players. ### Improved Touchscreen Support With SDL2 recently being set as the default rendering backend, progress on better integration of gamepads and touchscreens can easily move forward. Grorp’s PR to enable mouse and touchscreen input on any device paired with work by okias to switch between the two while playing marks another great step towards universal input support. ### Entity Animation Improvements Lars M. has extended the capabilities of armature bones, allowing mods to set individual bone position, rotation, and scale, with optional relation to defined animations and interpolation over time. This will finally allow game developers and modders to implement smoother entity animations in Lua. ### God Rays Shader x2048’s god rays shader was adopted by lhofhansl and merged into the development version of Minetest 5.9.0. Similar to dynamic shadows, game developers can choose to enable the new lighting API features to allow god rays in their games. Players must enable both bloom and volumetric lighting in their settings to utilize the new shader. Volumetric lighting in Minetest Game ### Touchscreen Tap Inputs Many items are used by holding the place button (right mouse by default), such as bows and shields from MineClone2. Until PR #14087 by grorp, these items did not work on touchscreens. With the PR merged, game and mod developers can determine which action a given item performs on a long or short tap. The PR also changes the default touchscreen punch behavior to a short tap, improving the Minetest combat experience and bringing it closer to other mobile voxel games. ## 2023 Game Jam Winners The 2023 Game Jam was held in December with the theme “Unexpected”. Contestants were given three weeks to make games from scratch and submit them to ContentDB. After the community ranked their favorite submissions on the new Game Jam Site, the winners emerged. ### 1st Place: Citadel by Irevol The ruins of the citadel Weave through the past and future in the 4-dimensional parkour puzzle game Citadel by Irevol. You are a daring explorer searching the ruins of an ancient citadel. You find mysterious runes which allow you to navigate space and time and unearth the secrets and treasures of the citadel. ### 2nd Place: The Velvet Crystal by Regulus The mission begins Recover the lost crystal and bring light back to the world in The Velvet Crystal by Regulus, a parkour game with a twist. Use your wand to perform stunts and help you navigate the castle. Gather information from voiced NPCs and defeat the final boss to recover the velvet crystal. ### 3rd place: The Unexpected Gambit by NO11 Your move Are you a chess lover? The Unexpected Gambit by NO11 will keep you on your toes with crazy moves that come at unexpected moments. Experience a very polished implementation of a classic game with interesting twists in The Unexpected Gambit. ### Honorable Mentions Thank you to everyone who participated in the game jam and congratulations to the winners! We hope all the participants continue to improve their games to become polished player experiences and great showcases of what Minetest can do. Here are some other interesting projects that emerged from the 2023 jam. #### MineOS It can even run Boom! MineOS by jordan4ibanez is an astonishing demo, especially for those familiar with Minetest’s GUI capabilities. MineOS implements a polished graphical operating system with retro sound effects and animations and includes several windowed apps to play with, including a 3D DOOM-like shooter. It was certainly unexpected. #### Shadow Forest The Shadows are coming! Shadow Forest by Wuzzy is a polished role-playing game where you fill the shoes of the Wizard of Light (and his trusty Light Crystal companion). Your quest is to rid the forest of the invading Shadows. Collect resources, level up your skills, and use your Staff of Light to defeat the Shadows. Read more about the making of Shadow Forest on Wuzzy’s website! #### Air Game by wsor4035 _This section intentionally left blank._ ## Mods News ### Vehicles from Apercy Lovebug 🪲 Savoia S.21 from "Porco Rosso" WWI planes APercy continues his line of quality vehicles in Minetest! His latest work introduces a Volkswagen Beetle to his Automobiles Pack, the Savoia S2.1 biplane from the 1992 Japanese animated film _Porco Rosso_ (Studio Ghibli), and a World War I airplane combat mod. ### TypeScript For Minetest jordan4ibanez has created custom TypeScript type definitions for Minetest to use with the TypeScriptToLua transpiler. He is developing and using it with his project ForgottenLands, written almost entirely in TypeScript. ### BlockExchange Better details page Featured schematics More login options The Blockexchange project by BuckarooBanzay has undergone a few rewrites and enhancements to improve the overall user experience. Blockexchange now supports logging in with ContentDB, features schematics on the homepage, supports CDB Collections and markdown on detail pages, and sports a new, faster interface. Check out the new features at https://blockexchange.minetest.ch. ## Art and Builds "Egyptian Temple" by jdiego, built using references of the Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu "Egyptian Temple", interior "Egyptian Temple", front wall "Colorlandia server spawn" by dibesfer "Ventilated computer with several commands executed on its large screen" by Bituvo. Find on the "Eden Lost" server at station "Computer" under travelnet "Thresher" at spawn ## Other News ### Minetest at Events in Italy In late 2023 Minetest was featured at several conventions around Italy thanks to Zughy and his sponsor Italian Linux Society. Zughy demonstrated Minetest and gave talks at several events, from underground videogame festivals like _Zona Warpa_ to free software events like _MERGE-it_ (you can watch one of the talks in Italian here). In December, Zughy also presented a workshop in Empoli, Italy where participants learned how to create minigames from scratch using arena_lib. It doesn’t look like these events are going to stop any time soon, so what’s next? FOSDEM! ## FOSDEM 2024 Minetest will be among several stands at FOSDEM 2024! FOSDEM is the largest free and open-source software conference in Europe and will be held on February 3rd and 4th in Brussels, Belgium. The Minetest booth will be showing off the engine and community content, giving out stickers and goodies, and introducing visitors to the platform! If you happen to be in the area, come say hi! Minetest at Freenode Live in 2018 ## Contributing to Minetest Want to contribute to Minetest but don’t know where to start? Start with these simple issues, or help fix the most annoying bugs for the community! Want to add a feature, but you’re not sure if it will be accepted? Have a look at the roadmap or choose an issue with the “Supported by core dev” label! Are you a professional artist or UI designer? Help us make our main menu more appealing and help create an identity for Minetest!

## Introduction Minetest 5.8.0 has been released with improved onboarding, a new Settings GUI, improved Android controls, and a lot more. You can download Minetest from our website. Also, check out the full changelog. ### Table of Contents * Minetest no longer ships with a default game * New Settings GUI * Improved Android controls * Rewritten sound support * …and more * Conclusion ## Minetest no longer ships with a default game Minetest is not a game - it’s a game creation platform that allows you to make your own blocky gaming experiences. Developers can make and share games. Players can find and play games using the Minetest client. For a long time, Minetest shipped with a default game called Minetest Game. This game was intentionally left bare to encourage players to mod the game and try out other games for Minetest. However, this led to new users thinking that Minetest Game was all Minetest had to offer. From 5.8.0, users will instead be directed to choose a game when first starting Minetest. Minetest Game will still be available to download, but the user will see other games as well. This gives greater visibility to the wide range Minetest has to offer. Note: you can still play multiplayer without installing any games. We’ll be improving the new user experience in the future, based on feedback. What new players will see when they open up Minetest. Games you can install. This is the next thing we'll be redesigning. ## New Settings GUI Minetest 5.8.0 comes with a new settings menu, designed to make it easier for new users to find and change settings. We’re going to be giving the entire main menu a makeover in a future release. The new settings menu ## Improved Android controls You can now place nodes using a single tap on Android. This makes building much easier. The Android joystick used to emulate key presses but is now read directly. This will make movement more responsive to user input, allowing the player to move in any direction and at varying speeds. ## Rewritten sound support Minetest’s sound code has been completely rewritten. This improves performance, fixes bugs, and unlocks new capabilities. Sounds are now lazy-loaded - this reduces memory usage and load times by only loading long sounds when needed. Game developers and modders have more options on how to play sound, including changing the start time and offsets. ## …and more The anti-aliasing code has been improved and modernised. There’s now the option to choose between two new algorithms - FXAA and SSAA. FXAA is faster but is less accurate. SSAA is very accurate but consumes more resources. A magnified screenshot showing how anti-aliasing smooths pixels (rollerozxa) As always, this release comes with new scripting features for game developers and modders. For example, developers can now change the texture of an item stack completely dynamically. This unlocks a lot of possibilities. ## Conclusion Those are just the highlights. Take a look at the changelog for a full list of changes. We’ve already started working on 5.9.0. There’s a ContentDB dialog (“browse online content”) redesign in progress, and work continues on switching to SDL for improved input and gamepad support. Make sure to follow the Minetest blog to keep up-to-date with engine development and community news.

The main menu gets more love in preparation for the 5.8.0 release, developers come and go, and new shaders are in the works. CTF celebrates its 10th anniversary, and new API mods make their way to ContentDB. * Engine News * Games News * Mods News * Art and Builds * Server News * Other News ## Engine News As the 5.8.0 release marches closer, more work has been done to improve the main menu. It now uses the latest version of formspec, properly supports hypertext, and uses a button in place of the settings tab. The user experience has been improved with better game bar scrolling, persisting text fields, and asynchronous package loading on the ContentDB page. Minetest’s newest core developer, grorp, has been hard at work fixing various GUI and rendering issues, improving the user experience, and squashing lots of bugs. 41 commits and counting! Desour has been busy cleaning up GUI elements, the sound manager, and compiler warnings. We extend a heartfelt farewell to x2048 as he steps down from engine development, and thank him for his work on bloom, shadow maps, mesh rendering, and numerous other improvements. His sky color, cascaded shadow maps, and batched particle rendering PRs are looking for adopters. Even more shaders are in development as well. Godrays developed by x2048 (now adopted and in testing) complement bloom and shadows wonderfully. GreenXenith has been working on a highly experimental screen-space reflection shader for water and other materials. It has a long way to go but adds another layer of beauty to the Minetest world. Godrays through the trees Screen-space water reflections ## Games News ### Capture the Flag August 16th, 2023 was Capture the Flag’s 10th anniversary. Capture the Flag is a multiplayer game where two teams of players battle to claim the other team’s flag while defending their own. It is played in a destructible voxel environment, allowing players to build defenses and place traps. You can find out more about CTF’s history and development in the 10th anniversary blog post. The game anniversary and 8th anniversary of the official server (`ctf.rubenwardy.com:30001`) were celebrated from August 16th to September 1st, with fireworks and party hats as cosmetics on the server. Party hats and fireworks Fireworks in the sky ### Glitch The winner of the 2022 Minetest GAME JAM has continued development since then. As of August, Glitch (by Wuzzy) has a weblate where the community can contribute game translations. You can read about the development history of Glitch on Wuzzy’s website. ## Mods News ### HTTP Blocks You can send `POST` and `GET` requests directly from Minetest using the new HTTPBlocks mod by 56independent! This Digilines device allows you to construct complex systems that can talk to web endpoints and request plaintext files, records, and any other raw web data. The mod, of course, requires HTTP trust to use Minetest’s HTTP API. Future plans include HTML querying using selector blocks, blocks to convert JSON to Lua tables, and maybe websocket support in the distant future. Downloaded HTML HTTP Statuses ### Unicode Text Rendering The Unicode Text library by erlehmann is built to render fixed-width and variable-width GNU Unifont fonts (`.hex`). UTF-8 text input is converted to a table of pixels that can be written to an image file (such as a PNG or TGA). Non-Unicode text can also be written using the Unifont CSUR font. By rendering text to a single image server-side, the full range of Unicode can be supported by servers without sending thousands or tens of thousands of textures to Minetest clients. The Unicode Signs mod by cora provides signs that use the Unicode Text library to draw text. Unicode text test Signs with unicode ## Art and Builds "Who wants to cook?" by 1.1.8.4 "City hall, German Creative Server" by Toadie "Mesecon-only (without Luacontrollers) computer" by 1F616EMO ## Server News ### Archtec archtec.niklp.net:30803 The Arctech server recently added chat bridges to Matrix and IRC for more flexible communication while in-game. Their building team has also been working on some cool new creations! ## Other News Keep an eye out for the 2023 Minetest GAME JAM later this year!

Work on the 5.8 release continues with some exciting new engine improvements, a classic game makes its way to ContentDB, and the use of Minetest in education was explored. * Engine News * Games News * Mods News * Art and Builds * Education * Server News * In Other News ## Engine News Several improvements have been in the works for Minetest 5.8. On touchscreens, it will be possible to place nodes with a single tap. New texture modifiers have been added, allowing developers to adjust texture hue, saturation and lightness, change contrast, create textures of arbitrary size, and more. Rubenwardy’s settings page redesign has been merged, marking an important step towards a better user interface. The new settings menu Another major improvment is Desour’s sound refactor which fixes several bugs (such as lag from loading large audio files) and adds many new features such as fade-in for positional audio. Finally, x2048 added antialiasing post-processing filters for smoother graphics. ## Games News ### Asuna Crystal Forest Cursed Lands Under Asuna by EmptyStar welcomes the otherworldly wonders of the Everness mod to its domain! From the sparkling vistas of the crystal forests to the haunted bogs of the cursed lands, down to the depths of its lush caves, icy caverns, and beyond— Everness is now a crown jewel of the Asuna experience. With a few personal touches and careful integration into Asuna’s fantastic fabric of biomes, Everness graces every corner of the world. Along with the inclusion of Everness, much work has been done to improve Asuna’s underground, new biomes have been added, and landscapes are now more diverse than ever. Join the new Asuna Discord server to stay up-to-date with Asuna’s development. ### BlockColor Blocks and colors In an effort to preserve an old, interesting game project, the mt-historical organization has added BlockColor by MrChiantos to ContentDB. The name says it all: It’s a world of blocks painted with a soothing palette of colors. ### Mineclone 2 The latest Mineclone update, “The Very Nice Release”, went live last month. It is mostly a quality-of-life update with bugfixes, performance, texture, and audio improvements. ## Mods News ### Mail New Mail Features Many servers rely on the Mail mod for in-game communication. Since the beginning of the year, the mt-mods organization has developed many new features and fixed several bugs using feedback from the YourLand server. They also added translations for at least 6 new languages. The biggest new addition is the “Sent Messages” folder, which required a complete rewrite of the storage system (by BuckarooBanzay). Other new features include mailing lists, sorters and filters, drafts, multiple-message selection, and a new “About” page. Most recently, the 1.2.0 release has brought settings, a trash system, major performance improvements, and bug fixes. Contributors to the mail mod include Athozus, S-S-X, BuckarooBanzay, fluxionary, and the YourLand server. ### Plushie Invasion Fluffy creatures and characters You may have noticed a recent rise in plushie content for Minetest. Three new mods— Fumo Plushies, and Amogus Plushie by aSliceOfCake, and Plushies by Atlante— introduce a plethora of fluffy decorations. ### Nodecore Cat Realm Cat Kingdom The Nodecore CatRealm modpack by Warr1024 and Mearson introduces a new NodeCore dimension inhabited by cats. Craft a portal, pay a cat a prill, and step out onto the mythical cat sky islands. Find new ores and craft powerful tools. Conquer the land of the cats! ### Arena_lib Rain in the Arena Development on Arena_lib by Zughy is nearing completion. With the latest update (6.3.0, “Piove?”) you can choose from rain, snow, or dust weather effects to stylize your minigame arena. You can also change the saturation of the screen inside a minigame to mute colors or create a black-and-white effect. ## Art and Builds "Bamboo Cave with Pool" by Heather "Carved Landscape from Mapgen with Rivers" by Lemente ## Education ### Minestory Students creating Lascaux-inspired cave paintings in Minetest during Minestory Every year, hundreds of students from schools across France participate in Minestory, an event created by French teacher Julien Crémoux in 2019. Students are tasked to replicate a heritage site from their local area such as Notre-Dame or the Louvre castle on a Minetest server, and then give a virtual tour of their creation. This year’s Minestory event was hosted in Terrasson-Lavilledieu in France on May 31st, 2023. 150 of the 413 participants visited the nearby Lascaux cave, which is known for its prehistoric cave paintings. Thomate, Riwad and Lemente were present to discuss the future possibilities of Minetest as an educational ecosystem and how to facilitate its adoption by educators. The next day, they organised a 10-minute workshop (one of 14 other workshops) in which students decorated a Minetest cave with recreations of paintings they saw previously using the ggraffiti and cave_painting mods. ## Server News ### Open Survival minetest.skiscratcher.com:30000 A Fresh Start On June 14, 2023, Open Survival had a total reset. To remedy increasing management complexity and provide a new experience for long-time players, the Open Survival team removed several mods and completely reset the world and the players. ## In Other News Better late than never, right?

After the release of Minetest 5.7.0 in April, there were some improvements to the API for craft items. MineClone2 got the “Safe and Sound” update, there were major mod content updates, and Zughy made a promotional poster for Minetest. * Engine News * Games News * Mods News * Art and Builds * Education * In Other News * In Other News ## Engine News We released Minetest 5.7.0 in April, read the release blog post for all the details. The ability to override item images has been merged now. This will make it much easier for modders to change the appearance of items in your inventory, unlocking more possibilities. Buttons in the user interface can now be styled differently when they are focused, making it possible to give context to users who are not using a mouse. Miscellaneous improvements include that markdown is now properly used for the Lua API documentation, Desour implemented crafting performance improvements, and some audio bugs were fixed. ## Games News ### MineClone2 Mineclone Trailer - the 'Safe and Sound' update MineClone2 v0.83, the “Safe and Sound” update, was released. The new version brings many quality-of-life features to players and server owners. Elytras used to move faster than the map generator could keep up with, so the maximum speeds on Elytra have been adjusted, and are now accessible in settings. New background music was added and some nodes now have new footstep sounds. The sunset visualization has been improved, and individual biomes have tinted water and greenery. Mobs can ride minecarts now, and bamboo can be broken by pistons. There are tons more improvements across the board; see the full changelog here. ### Exile Before After Exile by Mantar was updated to fix holes appearing in Exile’s landscape (aka waffling). This only fixes new areas by default, but the update also includes a command to fix already-generated terrain. ## Mods News ### X Farming The New Natural Rice Fields X Farming by Sakel saw a massive update to make farming more enjoyable. The new additions include: * Bees for apiculture, along with honey and other nodes. Bee “mobs” are nodes, so they are performant. The bees * Interactive candles which can be coloured with dyes. There are 4 possible candle nodes, which can be obtained by placing more candles in the same spot. * A BBQ stove on which to place up to 6 (cookable) items. It acts like a furnace but does not require fuel. * Rice farming Rice, Candles and the new stove (at about 3:00) * Shareable food which can be placed in the world allowing anyone wielding a bowl to take a portion of that food. Let the feasts begin! Miscellaneous additions include ropes and pillows. Finally, X Farming no longer has mandatory dependencies. It works with Mineclone out of the box and can be easily adapted to any other game. ### Automobiles Pack Styled Ride A new car, the 1977 Trans Am, was added to Automobiles Pack by Apercy. The vehicle introduces a 2-speed automatic transmission with visual cues for the player. ### Easter Eggs Easter Eggs Ineva, Sven, Glubux and Apercy have shared the Easter Egg mod from the Yourland Server. Search the wilds for naturally-spawning easter eggs, and enjoy yummy chocolate! ## Art and Builds Steampunk Castle, Build by Notsowow, inspired by shovel241's Minecraft build. A Luxurious Sea Villa on Tunnelers Abyss server, by Andrey01 ## Education ### Minetest at Journée du Libre Éducatif Minetest at JdLE 2023 Thomate and Lemente, who use Minetest to host various workshops, as well as Riwad Salim and Vincent Puig from the IRI Foundation who work on the UNEJ project, were invited to present how to “develop an educative and contributive digital common with the Minetest platform” at the French “Journée du Libre Éducatif”, an event dedicated to FOSS in education (find the full event program here). The main goal was to present the possibilities of Minetest and the benefits of Free Software in Education, with projects such as Minestory, Minetest Classroom, and Blockalot, to a handful of teachers and educators from across France. Guests were also able to meet and discuss how to better cooperate and contribute to the Minetest edu ecosystem. For more info, you can get in touch with them and other educators on Discord and Linkedin. ## In Other News ### Minetest Poster and Minetest presentation in Italy Minetest Poster by Zughy Zughy made a poster to promote Minetest as he presents Minetest at various conventions this summer. It is under a creative commons license, so anyone is free to print it out and post it on local posterboards. So far, there is an Italian and an English translation. You can find the files here. ### Minetest-related website shadow banned by Bing (and DuckDuckGo) The website of one of our code developers was banned by Bing and DuckDuckGo last year for an unknown reason. The website hosts the Minetest Modding Book along with some other Minetest-related resources. If you’d like to know more or think you might be able to help, rubenwardy wrote a blog post last month about the situation. ### Play Store Availability While it happened in May rather than April, we would like to note that Minetest (5.7) is once again available on the Android Play Store.

Last month, developers worked on the 5.7.0 release. We had lots of mod updates and releases. Also, Repixture got a soundscape rework. * Engine News * Games News * Mods News * Art and Builds ## Engine News The developers spent March working on a release, see the 5.7.0 release post for all the information. ## Games News Repixture release 3.9.0, “The Update That Changed Sounds Forever”, is a huge rework of sounds. The old soundscape was somewhat jarring, but now, after a lot of work and a few hundred new sound files, walking, digging and placing sounds much better. Additionally, Wuzzy introduced a player manual, which is not a walkthrough but should help you get started with the game. It serves as a reference for the game’s mechanics. ## Mods News ### AP Airship At the Airport The Captain's Gondola Fine Dining in the Skies Primarily an experiment with attachments, AP Airship by Apercy adds a huge dirigible balloon. Like Steampunk Blimp players can walk around inside it, and it adds special features such as clickable seats, more control, and a better ladder. Fuel is disabled for now, so it can fly indefinitely, but in the future Apercy will add a fuel mechanic. The Airship is affected by winds and supports climate_api from TestificateMods. ### Pizzaria Pizza al forno Pizzaria by Extex immerses you in your pizza-building quest. You will form the dough with a rolling pin, place ingredients on your pizza, physically place your pizza in the oven, and then slice up your masterpiece with a flourish using a pizza cutter. Minetest Game lacks meat, cheese, tomatoes, and olives. Pizzaria supports toppings from other mods such as pineapple and mobs_redo, but as a fallback, Extex invented “The Mese Mutation Crystal”, which allows players to turn their wealth into pizza ingredients. Running a pizza shop will require a steady stream of mese, gold, apples and … bones. This could get interesting. ### Mesecons Wuzzy contributed an update for Mesecons which adds pitch variation for noteblocks, increasing the range of possible sounds. A player can set the pitch for a sound from C to B by punching the block just as with the piano sounds. Fire and explosions have been excluded from pitch modification to preserve their quality. ### Mobs Redo Ow! Mobs Redo by tenplus1 added a damage flash indicator. Whenever a mob is hit it will glow orange for a moment if the setting `mob_hit_effect` is set to true. Mod authors can also define a custom `damage_texture_modifier` in the mob definition. Additionally, the API now has support for an injured animation, although mods will have to be updated to make use of it. ### Everness Coral Forest Deep Ocean Crystal Forest Deep Ocean Cursed Lands Deep Ocean Everness’s “Deep Ocean” update brings 3 new ocean biomes with sands, craftable blocks, corals, and ocean plants. It adds a “shell of underwater breathing” which makes exploring these biomes easier. Smaller fixes include new sounds for dirt, grass and ice blocks and Igloos with loot chests in Frosted Icesheet biomes. Happy exploring, everyone! ### X Farming This guy is outstanding in his field. X Farming by Sakel added a new scarecrow decoration for your farms. It can be activated with X farming’s bonemeal, making any nearby plants grow faster. ### Modlib A train model converted into glTF and editable in Blender Modlib’s B3D to glTF converter has been fixed and tested on about 1000 models from ContentDB. With this update, mod authors can use modlib to convert otherwise un-editable b3d models into an editable glTF format, allowing the community to clean up old models and re-export them. All animations are preserved during the process. In other words, even if the original Blender files have been lost, the model may be edited. In the future, it may also help with providing an easy upgrade path from B3D to glTF when Minetest gets support for glTF. An example workflow is here. ## Art and Builds A Shrine to my Bunny, by Apercy. Spartan, by Floh.

Minetest 5.7.0 has been released with improved graphics, performance improvements, and lots more. The Minetest 5.7.0 release is dedicated to Jude Melton-Houghton (TurkeyMcMac / jwmhjwmh), a core developer who passed away in February. You can download Minetest from our website. Also check out the full changelog. * Graphics and Performance * Rotating Entity Selection/Hit Boxes * Android Fixed Crosshair * …and more * Links * More screenshots ## Graphics and Performance ### Post-processing: Bloom and Dynamic Exposure Minetest now has a post-processing pipeline, with support for Bloom and Dynamic Exposure. This pipeline will allow for new effects to be implemented in the future, such as depth-of-field and volumetric lighting (god rays). Post-processing also improves the performance of tone mapping and allows for settings like saturation adjustment. Mods and games have control over whether these effects can be enabled on the client. Part of Minetest’s design philosophy is to give more control to game creators, this includes giving games more control over graphics. Dynamic Exposure is a feature that simulates eyes adjusting when going from a well-lit area into a cave, allowing for high dynamic range (HDR). A screenshot of the Backrooms game with bloom shaders, taken by Extex (CC BY 4.0) ### Improved Long-range Performance on Modern Hardware Minetest is well-known for supporting old hardware, but has often not made the best use of modern and high-end hardware. In 5.7.0, Minetest has a setting that allows better use of the GPU when uploading world data. This results in vastly improved performance on modern hardware at 500+ view ranges. Note that you don’t need to have a discrete GPU, modern integrated GPUs may still benefit from this optimization. In the future, this optimization is likely to be enabled automatically when Minetest detects that the hardware supports it. But for now, those with modern GPUs will need to change the “Client Mesh Chunksize” (`client_mesh_chunk`) setting to 4 or 8. You’ll also need to change some settings to load more of the map, here’s a guide on how to get a larger view range. With these changes, the bottleneck for getting a large view range is how quickly the server can send the map data; it can take a while to fully load a 1000 view range - that is 258,048 nodes in total. Map loading performance is likely to be improved in the future. Steam Deck: 600 view range at 53 FPS (rubenwardy, CC BY-SA 4.0) 1600x1600 area rendering at 20FPS (GreenXenith, CC BY 4.0) On Steam Deck (left), this optimization improves rendering performance from 10 FPS to 53 FPS on this forest scene - roughly 600 view range. ### Other Performance Improvements Performance improvements aren’t just limited to modern gaming hardware. The occlusion culler has been improved, which provides better performance by not rendering areas that cannot be seen. The culler is faster, too. To display the world, the client needs to turn blocks into 3d geometry called meshes. The mesh generator is now multithreaded, which will improve performance especially at large view ranges. ## Rotating Entity Selection/Hit Boxes There’s now support for rotating selection and hitboxes. which will allow mobs and players to have more accurate hitboxes. This will make combat much nicer, especially with larger monsters. Unfortunately, this is just for selection/hitboxes, it doesn’t change collision. Rotating selection boxes ## Android Fixed Crosshair Crosshair support for Android has been merged. Unlike desktop, Android defaults to punching/placing/digging where you tap. With this new feature, users can enable the crosshair to have an experience closer to desktop. ## …and more Mods can now find out the player’s window size, which will allow for full-screen and more responsive GUIs. It’s no longer possible to load a world if mods have unsatisfied dependencies. Before, Minetest would automatically disable these mods - but it led to confusion. You will need to add the missing dependency or disable the mods. ## Links Read the full changelog. Downloads: * Windows (64-bit) * Windows (32-bit) * macOS * Linux: Flatpak. See downloads page for more options ## More screenshots By GreenXenith (CC BY 4.0) By GreenXenith (CC BY 4.0) By GreenXenith (CC BY 4.0) By GreenXenith (CC BY 4.0)