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 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
I’ve done it to play with my kids. We were all on the local network but it was like a ten second job.
Have not tried it, but looks like others have had good experiences in the past!
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
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 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!
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
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 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!
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 😆.
Nice write-up! I read about Luanti a few months ago and have been meaning to check it out at some point. This gives me a better idea on what to expect.
yes, it’s pretty cool. but the UI needs work imo.
You have plenty of mods for this
I think the UI is fine, the in-game HUD is excellent (and better than Minecraft’s in my opinion with informative tooltips and the improved recipe book, plus 3x3 crafting grid w/o crafting table!)
I have added a comment with screenshots of the UI and HUD
I remember that i played this game around a year ago last time. I very enjoyed playing on Tunneler’s Abyss role play server. I think i should return here for a couple of weeks during adhd phase.
Does Luanti support shaders?
It does support mods and resource packs, not sure about shaders though. Haven’t checked though.
