Minetest

February, 14th 2025 - 15.5 MB - Open Source

Latest Version

Minetest 5.11.0 LATEST
Review by

Jack Taylor
Operating System

Windows 8 (64-bit) / Windows 10 (64-bit) / Windows 11
User Rating

Click to vote
Author / Product

The Minetest Team / External Link
Filename

luanti-5.11.0-win64.zip

Minetest is a free and open-source alternative to the popular multiplayer sandbox simulation title Minecraft, offering users access to creative gameplay features such as exploration, resource gathering, crafting, the building of structures, and an untold amount of emerging gameplay options that can appear during free flow online gameplay.

The game mimics a wide variety of features present in the original Minecraft title, only here, players are able to enjoy the world of Minetest for free, without the restrictions placed by distant dev teams.

Like the original title, Minetest can be played in multiple gameplay modes, and can be experienced in both offline solo and online play.

Main features

It was built from the ground up by the open-source focused Minetest Team of developers who have strived to provide a robust alternative to Minecraft without compromising on any gameplay element this influential game was introduced to the market in now distant 2011.

The voxel game includes both free-flowing exploration mode, survival mode, online cooperative game, and support for truly enormous maps that are 62,000 × 62,000 × 62,000 blocks in size. The functionality and visual presentation of the game can easily be enhanced with a wide array of community-created mods (such as high-quality texture packs).

As of early 2025, Minetest features an online library of over 2400 community source mods that are focused on game elements such as UI, combat, inventory management, game economy, sounds and music, online play, weapons, armors, the introduction of new minigames, and much more.

The open-source development approach has enabled players to take direct control over all aspects of this title, with built-in support for LUA API, several map generators, and access to the full open-source database.

PROS

Multiplayer functionality
Stunning game graphics
Lively and vivid color palettes
Soothing and calming gameplay experience

CONS

Multiplayer interactions may result in glitches
Absence of animals in the game
Repetitive gameplay mechanics
Limited interactions with in-game elements

Overall

Minetest is 100% FREE and can be played on all modern versions of Windows OS. Due to its simple visual style and optimized rendering, it can easily be enjoyed even on PCs with aging components, including old laptops.

Download Minetest Latest Version

What's new in this version:

Deprecations and compatibility notes:
- Clients >= 5.11.0 will no longer support BMP texture files. This deprecation was first announced in 5.8.0.
- Basic shaders support is now mandatory. New minimum required OpenGL version: 2.0.
- See https://github.com/luanti-org/luanti/issues/15370 for details.
- A bug related to skeletal animation has been fixed. The bug occurs when bones have “perfect” 180° rotations, equivalent to negatively scaling two axes. If these bones are then animated via bone overrides, the overridden rotation will incorrectly appear to be relative to the 180° rotation. This may result in wrong bone rotations for mods that rely on this bug. These mods need to fix the rotations passed to set_bone_override / the deprecated set_bone_position. Multiple workarounds are possible to ensure consistency with older Luanti clients which exhibit the bug, such as editing models to not have perfect rotations, overriding bone scale to force newer clients to replicate the bug, or overriding bone scale to work around the bug on older clients which support setting scale. See the issue for details.

Client / Audiovisuals:
- Fix shadow flicker on camera offset update
- In-game settings menu
- Add chat console scrollbar
- Fix occasional z-fighting rendering issues by overlay textures
- Fix MSAA and bloom flashing artifacts
- Main menu additions
- Add mods button
- Add server url button
- Add server favorite button
- Player list for public servers
- Fix bloom with post_processing_texture_bits < 16
- Fix distorted Sun, Moon and Star visuals based on Orbit Tilt
- New setting transparency_sorting_group_by_buffers. This may improve performance at the cost of visual issues.
- Implement an editor to customize the touchscreen controls
- This screen can be opened though the pause/exit menu.
- Support FSAA in combination with post-processing
- Support video_driver = opengl3 for non-SDL builds
- Rendering-related fixes

World / Server / Environment:
- Fix incorrect/outdated player inventory contents after failed “drop” action
- Fix clients sometimes erroneously disconnecting after 30 seconds
- Restore proper rollback database indexing

Script API / Modding:
- core.protocol_versions for easier engine version lookups
- Allow overriding fonts via media files
- New in-game debug view: highlight bounding boxes
- New function core.spawn_tree_on_vmanip
- Fixed fruit placement regression in L-system trees
- Continued work on the glTF model reader
- STEP (function) interpolation is now supported.
- New function core.settings:get_pos. This deprecates core.setting_get_pos.
- Add particle blend mode “clip”
- Documentation improvements
- Invalid ore_type values in core.register_ore now result in a proper error
- Add optional relative weight parameter to biomes

Misc / Maintenance:
- Improve sleep accuracy on FPS limiter
- This mainly affects Windows clients.
- Texture filters/generation speed improvement
- Performance improvements in rendering
- New setting mesh_buffer_min_vertices for fine-tuning.
- Crash fixes
- Replaced minetest.net with luanti.org in several places
- Implement script sandboxing for main menu
- Code cleanups and minor fixes