Translation(s): English
Contents
Luanti, formerly known as Minetest, is a voxel game engine written in C++ and licensed under the LGPL (version 2.1 or later). Games and mods can be easily created with its Lua API. "Minetest Game" (MTG) is one of the most common base games for the Luanti engine, offering a similar experience to Minecraft. MTG used to be bundled with the engine but the developers now encourage players to try out the numerous other games now available. Until they are packaged in Debian such games and additional mods can be downloaded in-game through the ContentDB. Mods in the ContentDB are not necessarily freely-licensed and, though curated by the game's developers prior to being published, are still third-party. Use an appropriate level of caution when installing and using items from there. Luanti also supports both survival and creative modes along with multiplayer support, dynamic lighting, and a large world size.
Packages
Several Debian packages are available as of Trixie, which you can install depending on your needs.
luanti: installs the engine and its data
luanti-game-minetest: installs Minetest Game
luanti-server: installs only the server
minetestmapper: utility to generate a map from a Luanti world
minetest-mod-*: optional third-party mods
Bookworm and prior releases have minetest and minetest-server instead, which come bundled with Minetest Game. Trixie also provides these packages to allow migration from Bookworm, but they will be dropped in Forky.
Note: Luanti servers running recent versions will often disallow older versions from joining because of incompatibilities. Mods also often set version requirements on the most recent release. The in-game ContentDB interface should prevent installing games and mods that expect a newer Luanti engine version than what is installed.
Play
After installing, you can either find it in the launcher for your desktop or open it in your terminal by running:
luanti
Configuration
The location of the configuration files is ~/.minetest (created during the first start of the game).
The configuration file contains minetest.conf player preferences (key, name, server address, ...). It is possible to change these settings in the file or directly from the game. An example configuration file can be found at /usr/share/doc/luanti/minetest.conf.example.gz.
More details about the configuration can be found on the page on the Luanti wiki.
In-game Commands
Display the in-game console with F10 key.
See the Luanti Wiki for a list of commands.
Privileges
See the Luanti Wiki.
Setting up a server
Network
For a public internet server, it is necessary that the port specified in the configuration file (30000 UDP by default) is accessible.
Initial setup
See luanti-server.README.Debian, which is installed to /usr/share/doc/luanti-server/README.Debian by luanti-server.
Install and enable mods
Install a mod
You can install the packages you want from the available mods.
If you need to install mods which aren't packaged yet in Debian (for instance, mobs_animal and mobs_monster), you can add them in the ~/.minetest/mods directory for local client installations or the /var/lib/luanti/default/mods directory for the default server configuration. See README.Debian in luanti-server for more details.
Mods and games can also be installed through the in-game ContentDB interface, though as a reminder these are not necessarily freely-licensed like the versions provided by Debian.
Enable a mod
You will need to enable mods after they're installed. Mod activation does not apply to your entire game, but to each specific world they're enabled on.
Once a server is started, it should create world files, and refresh them to add configuration lines with the available mods in the world.mt file.
First, stop the server running the world. Then edit this file to enable the mod, just change the value from false to true on the corresponding load_mod_* lines.
$ cat /var/lib/luanti/default/worlds/world/world.mt creative_mode = false auth_backend = sqlite3 player_backend = sqlite3 gameid = minetest enable_damage = true backend = sqlite3 load_mod_mobs_animal = true load_mod_mobs = true load_mod_mobs_monster = false