I just briefly run this mod in minetest-0.4.16 version and what I can say?
It is awesome! I am impressed! The world is beautiful visually, with great textures, full of nature, full of different kinds of plants, dirt/soils, rocks/stones... with fantastic details (with valleys mapgen as recommended).
It is wonderful that different types of trees are unique - no other minetest mod has them. Here, the author did not just take a few trees from one or another existing for a long time mods, but it looks like he did everything himself as a new stuff. Well, almost everything, some elements are similar to what we know from other mods, but definitely their appearance is completely innovative. This also applies to new types of wood planks. And birds! You can hear different birds voices! Lovely! (if I understand how it works, the mod contains birds' voices, but do not play them - to hear birds, you must also install TenPlus1`s
ambience mod, which serves here as a sound engine).
I like the abundance of different types of dirt. You take a few steps and you are already walking on different grass! Just like in ethereal, all these visually different types of dirt after you dig them out, in the inventory become one "default" dirt. I hope there is (or will be) some way to preserve the beauty of these various dirt blocks after placing them in the inventory (ethereal has a crystal shovel that allows it, and here I do not know if some tool with similar properties or other method for that exists, because I only played this mod very short time, I did not explore evrything yet). But in this world, there are not only different dirt textures. Here you can find much more different types of "surface blocks", different than dirt, stone and sand. For example, a player can wade in mud!
But what made the biggest impression on me? First time when I go under the surface. It just happened that in the place where I started to dig, there was not even single one
default:stone! I found there clay, silver sandstone, coal blocks, quartz_with_gold blocks, volcanic sand, limestone blocks, coquina limestone blocks, siltstone... It was fantastic! Unfortunately, from the level of -34 and lower I found only
default:stone :(((
What made me sad even more, there are many places on the map, where there is a
default:stone from the very surface level, you can dig down and find only that kind of stone. I thought that erywhere under the surface are similar layers of different kind of stones that spawns instead
default:stone. When I started digging and finding diversity of stones, I started wondering if there are also some hematite and magnetite blocks for iron ores, chalcocite blocks for copper (and maybe sulfur?)... well, I get my iron ores in default for Minetest Game and minecraft way...
To help a little there underground and to stop watching that generalized, antygeological default stone, tunnel which I dug through that stone I covered with concrete. In this world you can make the concrete from sand, gravel and quicklime (and that quicklime can be obtained from joining a limestone with two steel ingots and smelting results).
The player does not have to be afraid that with such a variety of stones different than
default:stone he or she will not dig traditional cobblestone to make stone tools. Stone tools should be able to do craft with any type of stone (eg with limestone).
In reference to the
discussion from elsewhere in the minetest forums, about Minetest Game and geology, I hope that in the future a day will come when in the game (not necessarily in the Minetest Game - after all we have here a wide range of modding technology) there will be no universal, uniform stone at all (I mean
default:stone), and the player will be able to enjoy the richness of geology...
In conclusion, this mod creates a world that has a very attractive nature, with beautiful details, making a great starting point for an interesting game. If you use Minetest Game as an environment for building your own game (by adding mods and configuring their properties in text files), and the world generated by the default mapgen already bored you, this mod can be a valuable replacement. It does not change any of the core properties that the Minetest Game has, but subtly changes biomes and stones, trees and birds in how they look like, how you feel the world ;) I need to find more time to play longer.
Thanks Dokimi!
This mod is already fully playable, but I am curious about what more you could do with it, by implementing more of your ideas.
PolySaken wrote:idea: add damage_per_second to matagouri and make it not walkable.
that stuff hurts.
Some people says it is "extremely thorny". It has creepy spikes on the pictures. I can easly imagine, that sitting on that plant can have worse consequences than sitting on a cactus ;-)