I believe this is the currently recommended thing for turning it into Minecraft: https://content.minetest.net/packages/Wuzzy/mineclone2/
And no, the client is not compatible with Minecraft servers.
Heads-up that Minetest itself does not try to get feature parity. It provides the tools to create pretty much any Minecraft-like games, and obviously you could re-create Minecraft with it, but the default Minetest game is deliberately kept simple to encourage modding.
If you're looking for a Minetest game that actually strives to be similar to Minecraft, I believe this is your best bet: https://content.minetest.net/packages/Wuzzy/mineclone2/
Hi,
Mineclone2 is a game built using Minetest, which attempts to reimplement the gameplay.
You can change a lot of constants, like acceleration and speed, from mods or settings without C++ modification.
> but Minetest can't connect to Minecraft servers
Having our own network protocol means we can tailor it to our own features rather than being limited by minecraft. Plus, it sidesteps legal issues - Minetest is a clean room implementation.
Minetest has a lot of features that Minecraft doesn't, and vice-versa, which makes the network protocols fairly different. The best way to have network compatibility would probably be to have some fake Minetest server that is also a client to a Minecraft server - a proxy/adapter application. The experience wouldn't be great though.
Really, you should treat them like the separate "games" they are.
> My question is, is there anything stopping us from forking Minetest, and trying to create a one to one clone of Minecraft?
It's all fine from the Minetest side - we're open source software.
You may reach concerns with IP from the Minecraft side though:
I'm not a lawyer, mind.
Well, it's certainly the most actively developed and has the biggest player base (and therefore also modding community).
If you've ever seen one of those hundreds of Minecraft clones on the Android Play Store, probably all of those are actually just Minetest with a texture pack and maybe a few mods.
But Minetest doesn't actually try particularly much to be like Minecraft. It rather sees itself as a game engine for creating all kinds of Minecraft-like games.
But as it happens, you can also get a Minetest-based game/modpack that actually tries to be like Minecraft: https://content.minetest.net/packages/Wuzzy/mineclone2/
But yeah, despite my over-the-top sarcastic advertising, I'm actually quite fond of Minetest.
It's, you know, free, which certainly helps, it runs more than fine on my potato and one aspect that you can't see immediately, but which affects so much, is that the world height is actually enough.
The world generator spits out actual mountains for you to build a sky castle on top.
And mining is actually fun, because it's not anymore the most efficient to just dig straight down to diamond level and then strip-mine the whole place.
Which is because caves are actually not anymore completely flat. It actually makes sense to bring ladders to your mining trip. And you'll be glad to hit even just iron level.
In my current game, as soon as I had hit Mese (≈Redstone), I put all of that into rails to get me down and back out of my thousand-block-deep mineshaft. And it actually felt sensible to do this, because you get more densely packed ores the deeper you go.
Eventually, I also broke into a cave which was big enough to build an entire city underground. Which is a daunting task that I'll still have to tackle.
Well there are games for it you can download from the launcher. https://content.minetest.net/packages/Wuzzy/mineclone2/ its mostly feature complete copy of minecraft 1.11. so that would be your default.
It does add mobs to the game so it feels less lonely. I'd recommend a read through the ContentDB page for Mineclone 2 here to see what else it adds.
Minetest Game by itself is pretty boring (It's a little better in 5.0). I would recommend adding mods.
There are also quite a few games made for Minetest. One of those games does a pretty good job of imitating Minecraft. You might want to check that out