Technically Luanti isn’t a Linux-exclusive game, but it is open-source and I am running it on Linux natively (EndeavourOS, which is based on Arch!)
I have tried out Asuna and Mineclonia, two of the most popular survival games on Luanti. The screenshots are all from Asuna, as that was the one I enjoyed playing the most. Mineclonia is trying its best to replicate Minecraft, meaning you become more critical of things that are a bit different (a little like how people often complain more about Windows clone Linux distros vs ones that are doing their own thing), but I think Asuna was a more enjoyable experience because there were a lot of improvements to the gameplay over Minecraft.
For example, the 3x3 crafting grid is in your inventory in Asuna, so you don’t need to bring crafting tables everywhere! There’s also a built-in recipe list, and it’s actually super useful as you can also see the recipes a certain item is used in when you double click, so if you selected cobblestone, it would show you the pickaxe recipe, stairs recipe, etc. Sprinting in Asuna is very speedy too, apparently it’s a 100% speed increase, which is kind of insane, but it does deplete your hunger very quickly. One more thing about the UI, I also like that the tooltips of the items show you their properties (like bounciness or durability). I’m a bit puzzled by the “research” tab though, it seems to eat an item and tells me the item group (which seems like useless information unless I’m missing something? There’s also a level indicator which gains xp if you feed multiple of the same item, not sure what that’s about)
There’s also more mobs, more blocks (especially the decorative kind, there was a lot more variants on the different types of stone for example), and lots more biomes as well. It feels like some sort of modded Minecraft where you have a bunch of new bits to explore again, and the terrain generation is more interesting as well! In my little base, I used “chrysoprase”, which is a green stone, and it’s a bit like deepslate or blackstone in Minecraft where you can use it in place of cobblestone in recipes, and you can make walls, bricks, etc. In fact, all the stone variants (of which there were many, including different coloured granites, the bright green chrysoprase, dark green jade, and probably lots more others I haven’t discovered) can be used like this, while in Minecraft that isn’t the case.
There are even plenty of new animals, in particular I love that birds spawn flying in the sky! The main hostile mobs I encountered were slimes, and there were many variants with different properties. For example, aquatic slimes have a slight glow, while poison slimes leave damaging goo on the floor. It’s a bit like that colourful slime mod for Minecraft where you can get all sorts of colours of slime for your builds! I also noticed that some of the slimes stole my items, and that they drop them once I kill them (accompanied by a delightful squish animation), which is also new!
It’s pretty cool how you can install mods super easily in Luanti, though Asuna already includes a lot of the mods by default. I also like that it’s super easy to set up multiplayer, it’s just a checkbox to host a temporary server (and I believe you can set up an always-on server as well)
There are some “missing” bits though. My main gripe is that there is no swimming in Asuna by default, making crossing water quite difficult. There is a mod that adds swimming animations, but they don’t increase speed and are quite buggy as well. Additionally, there are some bugs, as chickens have repeatedly disappeared in front of me. No idea why, and it’s only once I have them safe in my pen! The pathfinding of the animals is also not as good, the chickens can’t go around the open fence gate door when following the seeds. You also won’t get compatibility with all the existing Minecraft worlds, mods, and shaders, but that’s to be expected. I play with shaders in Minecraft sometimes so that is something I miss. There is native controller support in Luanti as well, and in Java edition Minecraft, that requires a mod like Controlify!
I don’t have much else to complain about though, it’s simply really fun to try something new and fresh once in a while. If you have any questions, let me know!
p.s. does anyone know what the “research” thing does in Asuna? There’s not much documentation on the game online (another upside for Minecraft, there is a VAST swath of information online about every little feature)
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For real! I have been chasing the dragon of that 2012-Minecraft-feeling for a while, and have finally found it in Luanti. Runs surprisingly well on Android too, so i just sync my local world using syncthing, and seamlessly play my little world across multiple devices.
Really cool project, that deserves all the love it is starting to get.
Since micro$lop destroyed MC, Luanti is all I play. It’s so much better. MC has become fortnite spam like every other gross game out there.
Oh and also micro$slop stole my copy PURCHASED WITH MY OWN MONEY from me and will not give it back (because when they were ruining Mojang, I wasn’t gaming, so I never saw the account change. There’s no way they’ll see another penny from me.
Same here. I bought Minecraft and stopped playing for a bit. Now I have no way to migrate my account from Minecraft to Mojang to Microslop. They stole money from me. Fair game because now I’ll steal all of their products.
Yep, fuck em
I play Voxe Libre its the one Mineclonia was forked from. And its the best game in Luanti. You have shaders in it, just go to graphics settings and turn them on, i think its the feature of the Luanti engine, not the game itself, so you should have it in Asuna as well. Also rendering distance is infinite, you can incrise it as much as you want, or rather as much as your pc can handle… What i like in Luanti is that you can have world 100 times deeper than Minecraft, but for now Voxe Libre didnt use that feature…
i’ve played luanti for a while and loved it! it’s really neat and has a lot of potential. i’ve even gone to write a custom modpack for it.
I knew minetest had changed it’s name but, I thought it was something different than luanti for some reason.
I have to agree, its a pretty good game, I couldn’t get into how barebones it was last time I checked it out but, its been awhile so it seems that I need to add it to my need to try again list
My daughter and I played this last night. She thinks it’s the official Minecraft and I don’t have any reason to explain the difference, yet.
Haha that’s fun
Minetest/Luanti is twice free (as speech and beer). Minecraft is neither. So it’s better.
I haven’t tried minetest/luanti but heard a lot about it over the years. One thing I wanted to ask, is there redstone?
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luanti is a launcher, launched minetest. It only has powered rail and something called brake rail, but there’s no power blocks, redstone, yada yada.
No idea, that will depend on the game you install (and there could be equivalents that work differently, like those modpacks for Minecraft that change it up)
I love it when the libre software world moves from “what if there was an open source version of this” to “thanks for the starting concept, dear company, we’ll take it from here and make something bigger and better”.
I remember I tried Luanti a while ago (before the name change) but got a bit confused by the many games, like I thought it would be literally just a libre version of minecraft with builtin moddability. Once I read a bit about it it made a lot more sense, but by that time I was too busy to try it again. I’ve been thinking of getting back to gaming, I might give this a shot if I can’t find a libre version of Dwarf Fortress.
edit: changed ‘free’ to ‘libre’ to avoid ambiguities.
Luanti is basically if you add some bits and pieces to a block rendering engine. And then you add modpacks (Asuna, Mineclonia), to have more than a flat world with trees.
I especially liked the then already old “valleys” worldgen back then. Is it still around, or something similiar?
What do you mean? Dwarf Fortress is free software.
🤦🏾♂️ Free as in freedom, DF isn’t even source available.
For me, it’s Vintage Story which also runs natively on Linux.
Woah, that does look cool! And damn, it’s been there for a decade, surprised I’ve never heard of it. From what I can tell online it’s very well developed with lots of interesting mechanics
Vintage Story has a vastly different pace from Minecraft. It’s nice to plod around with friends. Everything feels like a big undertaking.
It’s such an insane game with so much content it’s incredible. And the mods are made by madmen who add things like butchering and even more food items (my friend who loves cooking in this game is overwhelmed sometimes with how much stuff he can cook)
It’s gotten pretty successful the past couple of years and the studio has hired a lot more developers to work on it. There’s also a pretty big modding scene with lots of really cool mods.
I hadn’t heard of this one before, but it looks really impressive!
If you want to try something similar to Minecraft with deep survival, crafting and seasonal mechanics give Vintage Story a try.
I recently gave it a shot and it’s quite good. Hitting H for the in-game handbook is your friend.
for those who were wondering like I was:
A majority of the game’s code is under a source-available license on the Anego Studios GitHub.
(from the wikipedia)
I can’t get Vintage Story to stick for some reason. GregTech New Horizons (Minecraft mod pack) is more my jam for this kind of complexity.
No worries! I hope you have many hours of enjoyment from that. Have a good one out there.
I don’t think you can make double chests in Asuna, hence four single chests rather than two doubles.
I will still play Minecraft, as it runs natively on Linux (using Prism Launcher, which is awesome for managing instances, mods, and shaders!), but I will occasionally play some Luanti if I want to try something different.
Obviously
Prism very good!
Screenshots of the UI and in-game HUD:
One problem I found during initial install was that the scaling was not automatic, making the icons very small, so it could be an accessibility issue for those with higher res screens. I had to manually adjust HUD scaling to 2.0 to properly see the icons.
Looking through the settings, it looks like “researching” different items with give you an “earned creative mode” where fully researched items can be duplicated, pretty interesting. This functionality can be disabled though. p.s. There’s a lot of stuff you can change, like hunger, mob spawning mechanics, whether you can jump over fences and walls (allowed by default, confused me for a bit), how player death is treated (dropping items vs storing them in “bones”, basically death chests), etc.
You can also set a delay on how long it takes for the “bones” to be lootable by other players, or disable that completely so only the owner of those items can take them
p.s. I love that the inventory UI has a proper dark mode. Minecraft requires a resource pack for something similar! I do wish some of the text had icons / were replaced with icons, but it looks fine as it is.
Isn’t this what Minetest got renamed too? If so I loved playing this years ago. Hosted a modded server with some roommates and had a blast. Had things like computers you could program for automation and stuff. Even was able to build a nuclear reactor for power. My favorite memory was someone accidently triggering a meltdown and yelling at everyone in the house to get on and help with damage control and we all did. Very fun.
Yeah, I imagine that was because they started to grow an ecosystem of games that aren’t clones of Minecraft. It’s super fun!
I’ve never played Asuna, but the research thing sounds like it’s copied from Terraria’s journey mode. Research enough of an item and you can duplicate it endlessly, as an alternative to a more traditional creative mode.
Sounds like there’s more Terraria influence too, like slimes holding items and the lack of swimming. I wonder if you’re supposed to find boots of water walking or flippers for swimming, so you can cross water easier.
I don’t have a problem with that. Terraria has a lot of great ideas, that’s why so many Minecraft mods (and apparently also this) also use them.
Research enough of an item and you can duplicate it endlessly, as an alternative to a more traditional creative mode.
Yep, that’s what it looks like too from what I can tell from the settings tooltip
Sounds like there’s more Terraria influence too, like slimes holding items and the lack of swimming.
That sounds pretty neat. Maybe I should play Terraria sometime…
It’s pretty fun. The main reason i haven’t played much lately is that it crashes my computer and i have not figured out why.
