

Minetest 0.4.10 was released yesterday. It’s been half a year since the previous release, 0.4.9 and thus this one contains a lot of stuff compared to it.

This release also marks the first stable(ish…) (well, more stable than the non-stable ones anyway) version of the official Android port of Minetest.

The subgames

We were supposed to be putting multiple subgames in this release while keeping minetest_game frozen, but that didn’t happen.

I set out to figure out the situation with subgames a few days ago. By testing the games, it seemed to me that Carbone had a lot to it compared to minetest_next. Also, I really like nodetopia, which sadly currently is too broken, according to the author. Most other subgames seem to be in a similar state.

Most of the community really wanted minetest_next to be included and I wanted to know more about it as I didn’t really see exactly what its point is. This produced these two documents. I wanted to know about gameplay direction, but couldn’t pull it out of them. It turns out _next was actually an undead version of _game which hadn’t changed practically at all – it really has a lot of momentum. Given that minetest_next had to be selected, Carbone didn’t make much sense as it is basically the same thing polished a bit and with extra mods. So, here we are, with _game continuing to be included and continuing development.

The future of subgames

As for subgames, I would *really* encourage you to make smaller polished ones, with interesting goals, limitations and which take new players well into account. With minetest_game continuing development and not being able to take it out, bundling a subgame largely based on it simply does not make sense.

Meanwhile, go download and try out Carbone, it does do many things better than minetest_next/game. You may also want to be following nodetest/voxelgarden. And all the other things happening here.

The release announcement and download links

Check out the 0.4.10 release announcement on the forums.

Download it on the download page.

Read random IRC discussion after release in the logs.

Oh, also, go check jeb’s recent comment on reddit!