Minetest is a free and open source game engine. Popular games include "Lord of the Test" and "Minetest game". It can be downloaded at https://www.minetest.net/
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Minetest contains examples of:
- Floating Continent: Minetest can produce floatlands too, depending on the map generator. These can exist because no node ever falls upon creation, rock never falls at all, and even dirt needs a mod to fall. The blobby landscapes created by the v5 mapgen include frequent floating islands of various sizes due to the nature of the map generator. For the v7 mapgen, there is a setting that produces vast floatlands at height 1280 and above which are therefore invisible from the ground; this is still experimental, though. The other map generators don't produce floatlands unless a mod is involved.
And there is a number of mods for floatlands which is not surprising since Minetest is essentially a modding platform.- Watershed is an entire map generator that also includes floatlands.
- Floatindev produces rather bizarre floatlands that may be so thin that they have holes in them, so be careful where you step unless you have fly mode on. The same goes for Skylands which is a more advanced fork.
- Fracture adds floatlands to existing map generators in such a way that they can sometimes reach down to the ground so that they can be climbed onto.
- Hallelujah Mountains adds floatlands to any existing map generator. If used with the singlenode mapgen, it creates a world that consists of floating land only with no ground below.
- Watershed
- Game Mod: Minetest is an open-world voxel game similar to Minecraft and even more moddable. It has had a "modding API" from the very beginning, also because its own built-in contents are connected over this API instead of being hard-coded. Essentially, Minetest itself is only an engine, but it comes with a game named minetest_game that takes its elements out of "mods". This means that you can not only add more mods to minetest_game, but you can also install wholly new games completely independent from minetest_game, ranging from countless more or less faithful Minecraft clones for those who complain that everything that makes Minetest different from Minecraft
suck to games that simulate Australia or post-apocalyptic wastelands to Lord of the Test that takes you to Middle Earth.
Starting with version 0.4, the focus on modding grew when the new Minetest developers threw lots of features out of minetest_game, making it fully playable but somewhat bare-bone, and leaving it to the community to soup it up with mods. Even with minetest_game, Minetest has been turned into a modding platform. - Ghibli Hills: various map generators can create beautiful landscapes (and their opposite), especially when certain plant or world mods are in play, and there are many, many screenshots with this kind of Scenery Porn on the official forum. On public servers (or in local worlds if you're busy enough), you may have entire cities directly adjacent.
- Insistent Terminology: According to its community including the devs, Minetest, a voxel miner not too dissimilar to Minecraft, is a game platform or, better yet, a modding platform. And not a game. Games run on it. minetest_game, which is bundled with Minetest, is a game, Mineclone2 is another game, Nodecore is yet another game, Lord of the Test and Infinite IKEA are games, too. By the way, these are games. And no longer subgames.
- Mordor: Some biomes like the various deserts and the ice biome are pretty much devoid of plant life. You can't even get raw materials for tools. If you have a hunger mod on, and you spawn in one of these, good luck finding another biome before you starve.
- The Ethereal mod adds, amongst other things, a whole lot of new fantastic biomes to the standard minetest_game. One of them is a volcanic biome that gives you lava in countless craters on the surface. Can be useful, but very harsh and even difficult to navigate. Another one, often directly adjacent, is a scorched wasteland with nothing on the bone-dry surface but dry shrubs and burned tree trunks. At least you can make charcoal out of the latter (hey, lots of cheap fuel).
- There's a mod that adds a Minecraft-like Nether to Minetest.
- The biomes in the Australia mod and the Outback subgame emulate those in Australia, including arid, hostile deserts like the Pilbara. Both the mod and the game are works in progress, so they aren't too rich in food in general, but these deserts provide you with next to nothing, so you may reconsider if you want to play them with a hunger mod. At least they both don't come with mobs yet.
- All biomes in the Lord of the Test game are modeled after Middle Earth, so you get Mordor proper including orcs (unless you have the option "only_peaceful_mobs" on). And it expands, but so does Gondor.
- There are extreme survival games that turn the entire freaking map into this. Beware if they add mobs, and you've got "only_peaceful_mobs" off.
- That said, seeing as how easily tweakable Minetest is with its Lua modding interface, you may mod it so that it creates entire worlds made of concrete if you want to. Or obsidian if you want to go with black.
