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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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.
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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…
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
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.
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.
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’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’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.
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?
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)
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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.
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
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
Do I actually need an account to play Luanti? It’s just self hosting without internet requirement, right? I’m not interested into multiplayer, so is it even worth then?
You don’t need one
You don’t need an account to play single player, nor do you need to self host anything! You only self-host if you want a server that people online can join for multiplayer, but if it’s only a couple friends, you can do local multiplayer w/o self-hosting.
I just downloaded the Flatpak and its surprisingly easy. I thought there would be some initial configuration or so, don’t know why I was expecting that to be honest. And there are lot of “games” available; I only expected a Test Game to be available. Why are these downloadable games so small actually? I’ve downloaded a tutorial, which in my opinion should be starred too, as it was on page two or so.
So many questions. Sorry, it’s just surprising to me. The only time I ever played Minecraft (maybe 30 minutes or an hour) was on an emulator for Playstation 3, just to test if the emulator works. That’s the extend of my knowledge so far. :D To be fair, I’m also not the target group for this game. The only reason I try it out is to get an understanding how these games work and to have some basic knowledge of one of the most important and played games of all time.
Why are these downloadable games so small actually?
Because 1) most of the game logic is handled by the Luanti base (movement, inventory, rendering, that sort of stuff), and 2) modern games have gotten so bloated it makes relatively reasonably sized games look small
The tutorial is helpful for basic controls, but nothing is too foreign and I was able to pick it up after looking at the hotkeys, remapping some of them to be more convenient (e.g. inventory to E, not I)
The only reason I try it out is to get an understanding how these games work and to have some basic knowledge of one of the most important and played games of all time.
understandable. in this game (mineclonia which is exactly the same as minecraft, content-wise) you collect resources and turn them into something else, quite a lot how real world (industry) works. there’s two types of raw resources: renewable and non-renewable resources. renewable means stuff like plants (yes, you can plant and harvest crops. use a hoe on a patch of dirt to turn it into farmland, then you can plant seeds there. they grow after a while) and animals (cows, chickens, etc which you can feed with grains etc) and monsters (these spawn in the environment, they can harm you if they touch you for example but you can kill them with a sword and they drop loot like zombie flesh, bones, spider eyes etc which are useful for some recipes).
and then there’s non-renewable resources which you can dug up from under the ground. stuff like raw iron ore, which you can then “cook” (smelt) in a furnace to get processed iron ingot, which you can then use in a lot of recipes to turn into other things, such as railways, wagons, pistons, etc.
there’s quite a lot of content actually but these are the basics.
Thanks for the quick introduction. After the tutorial I’ll try Mineclone first then, and then the other games to see how they differ. Overall Luanti and its community content is impressive.
At the moment I can’t seem to find a way to rebind ESC key to open the main Luanti menu. Or bind any other key to open the main menu too.
The only thing I hate about lunati is the fucking eating sound fx. Atrocious. Otherwise splendid.
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
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.
Vintage Story has a vastly different pace from Minecraft. It’s nice to plod around with friends. Everything feels like a big undertaking.
I hadn’t heard of this one before, but it looks really impressive!
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!
