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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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 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…
I love it when the free software world moves from “what if there was an open source version of this” to “thanks for the starting concept, dear company, we’ll take it from here and make something bigger and better”.
I remember I tried Luanti a while ago (before the name change) but got a bit confused by the many games, like I thought it would be literally just a free version of minecraft with builtin moddability. Once I read a bit about it it made a lot more sense, but by that time I was too busy to try it again. I’ve been thinking of getting back to gaming, I might give this a shot if I can’t find a free software version of Dwarf Fortress.
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.
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)
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)
Vintage Story has a vastly different pace from Minecraft. It’s nice to plod around with friends. Everything feels like a big undertaking.
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.
I hadn’t heard of this one before, but it looks really impressive!
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 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.
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.
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)
You don’t need one
Fun Fact: Minecraft also runs on Linux
Turns out Java’s “Write once run everywhere” is pretty neat.
Well I did mention that at the end, and I won’t stop playing Minecraft anytime soon. Luanti is still really neat and I will occasionally play it when I want something different, and is an awesome option for people who don’t want to purchase Minecraft / simply want something that is more modular and unique.
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.
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!
Screenshots of the UI and in-game HUD:
One problem I found during initial install was that the scaling was not automatic, making the icons very small, so it could be an accessibility issue for those with higher res screens. I had to manually adjust HUD scaling to 2.0 to properly see the icons.
p.s. I love that the inventory UI has a proper dark mode. Minecraft requires a resource pack for something similar! I do wish some of the text had icons / were replaced with icons, but it looks fine as it is.
Looking through the settings, it looks like “researching” different items with give you an “earned creative mode” where fully researched items can be duplicated, pretty interesting. This functionality can be disabled though. p.s. There’s a lot of stuff you can change, like hunger, mob spawning mechanics, whether you can jump over fences and walls (allowed by default, confused me for a bit), how player death is treated (dropping items vs storing them in “bones”, basically death chests), etc.
You can also set a delay on how long it takes for the “bones” to be lootable by other players, or disable that completely so only the owner of those items can take them
Isn’t this what Minetest got renamed too? If so I loved playing this years ago. Hosted a modded server with some roommates and had a blast. Had things like computers you could program for automation and stuff. Even was able to build a nuclear reactor for power. My favorite memory was someone accidently triggering a meltdown and yelling at everyone in the house to get on and help with damage control and we all did. Very fun.
Yeah, I imagine that was because they started to grow an ecosystem of games that aren’t clones of Minecraft. It’s super fun!
I play Mineclonia with my kids.They are reasonably young still, so we play in creative mode and build great things together. I’m running a local server so they can all join together and work together.
I didn’t find out about Asuna until we were well into our world, so while I also have an Asuna world set up we haven’t really used it. I will admit that it’s very helpful to just be able to search up the Minecraft wiki to see how things work for Mineclonia.
it’s very helpful to just be able to search up the Minecraft wiki to see how things work for Mineclonia.
Oh, I didn’t think about that, that is pretty neat! I imagine there are a couple differences to things like mob behaviour and the little things though, but for general information that seems super useful!
Oh I am sure there are differences. I also recently found that the fireworks rockets aren’t implemented in Mineclonia (I found a issue in the bug tracker and a PR that was never merged where they talk about how it’s hard to do in the Luanti engine), but for the most part I’ve just been able to look up the Minecraft wiki. I bought and played Minecraft when it was in Alpha, so my knowledge is a bit out of date 😆.
I used to play back when it was called minetest and I often wondered why kids with no money to buy minecraft didn’t popularise it.
Getting a cracked copy of Minecraft was the easiest thing back then. You could search for Minecraft and the second result was a cracked launcher
I used to play minetest many years ago. This is one of the games I really want to get back. But I played on a server these years ago and I dont know what I was called nor I know how I called myself ingame
Does anyone know how to find these old servers? are they sill on? It was kinda like citybuild but in a generated world. And I belive it was a german server. Its probably offline anyway
How’s the multiplayer and hosting experience? I hosted a minecraft server for my friends some time ago and we all had loads of fun. I think they’d also like something new like this
Works fine, connect to the hosts IP. Ive been doing multiplayer on mineclonia with mods all year with my wife and all our issues traced back to her bad motherboard. Since we swapped it, zero issues.
I’ve done it to play with my kids. We were all on the local network but it was like a ten second job.
As someone who never has gotten the hang of hosting anything it makes my head explode.
Have not tried it, but looks like others have had good experiences in the past!
