Hi, Wuzzy, pleased to meet you at last (it has taken me two days to find a computer whose IP was not registered as a spammer, which seems to be the case with my home PC, and to find a question that I can answer to get past the anti-robot bouncer).
I am what you are looking for: a total newbie (I don't even know yet what the name of a player in multiplayer mode is, I just found out that the version after 1.0.10 is 1.0.11 or something like that, and I still have doubts about whether roses have spines), who had no idea how Minetest (or Minecraft, for that matter) worked, and who is willing to provide you with feedback about your amazing tutorial.
First things first: congratulations on a subperb idea flawlessly carried out. I doubt I will ever be able to craft something as beautiful and useful as your tutorial. I haven't got past the first corner yet, but just by translating it into Spanish I have learned an awful lot about how Minetest works. If there ever is an official tutorial I hope it is based on yours.
As for feedback, I disagree with some comments I came across regarding too long explanations. They are exactly what I was looking for! There is some very useful help in the wiki (
http://wiki.minetest.net/How_to_build_your_first_house), but it does not give as much basic information as your tutorial, and in fact the first time I tried to follow those instructions I ended up in really deep water, both metaphorically and literally (there must be a corpse out there somewhere).
As for suggestions for improvement, and taking into account that I still haven't really explored your tutorial, I miss two things: one explanation about whether it is possible to crawl along a tunnel which is less than 2 blocks high, which I think I can't do, and some information about where to find recipes for crafting things, as well as a more obvious (for you, not for a genuine newbie like me) explanation about where to mine for raw materials. That is the one thing which I think it is not possible to do in your tutorial, apart from getting out of the castle, isn't it?
Below is a link where you can download my translation from. I hereby give you the right to include it in your distribution so that it is available for anyone who needs it. I am not sure about a few terms yet, but it is legible and grammatically correct. By the way, I would include in the template.txt file which is supposed to facilitate new translations a warning about not changing anything in the original English text, because I did, and it took me quite a while to find out why it wasn't working.
I found a couple of mistakes in the signs (that's why I had changed some things), like a mention to 13 gold coins instead of 14, or the other way round, I can't remember now).
One other thing: "dough" is the English word for a mixture of flour and water, I think in your tutorial you mention that you can craft dough into bread, but unless you have previously had to mix the flour and water, maybe you need to change that word (we would not have these problems if we could mine for potatoes in Minetest, they need only be put into an oven for a while, and also they are more nutritious than cereal). I am surprised no one seems to have thought of this, given that potatoes grow underground, probably there weren't any Irish people in the developers team.