[Game] Voxelgarden [2025-09 r19]

[rudzik8]

Experimenting with sfinv switch... I hate how the tabs look (I can't even style them!), but the switch will be necessary anyway.

screenshot_20240418_124802.png (792.02 KiB) Viewed 4753 times

You are very welcome to test it!

https://codeberg.org/voxelgarden/voxelgarden/pulls/25

Clone the repo into your games folder and do git checkout new_inventory to switch to this branch.

[rudzik8]

Guess what? It's time to experiment again.

screenshot_20240501_153352.png (978.48 KiB) Viewed 4657 times

screenshot_20240501_153506.png (828.52 KiB) Viewed 4657 times

screenshot_20240501_153617.png (332.26 KiB) Viewed 4657 times

[rudzik8]

I've created a survey to collect some feedback. It only consists of 6 questions, and I'd greatly appreciate your responses.

https://rudzik8.limesurvey.net/521638

[rudzik8]

2024-31 r2

Starting from this release, all updates are done on a weekly rolling basis.

Changes from 5.8.0-4

Big gameplay novelties

Nether realm:

• A hellish new realm, full of lava, fire, crust and more.
• Nether is separated from the regular world with an unbreakable bedrock layer.
• Nether portal is a 4x5 vertical obsidian frame.
• Floatlands portal (for mgv7) is a 3x3 horizontal ice frame.
• Look into the Book of Portals to see more informations on portals.
• All portals can be ignited with the Realm Striker, a new item found within dungeons deep underground (Y -5k and below).

Metal progression redo:

• Fuel-powered alloy furnaces, made out of brick blocks. Use them to make ingots that are unobtainable through regular cooking or crafting.
• Iron lumps now cook into iron ingots, not steel ingots.
• Iron blocks now spawn underground instead of steel blocks.
• Alloy iron ingots with coal lumps to make steel ingots.
• Alloy copper ingots with tin ingots to make bronze ingots.
• Tin is now used for the bucket recipe.
• Iron is used for the locked chest recipe.

Trees redo:

• Aspen is now Birch, with new textures for the leaves and the sapling.
• All tree types now have their own wood planks, with fences, gates, mese posts and more (with help of @j-r).

General changes

• Score mechanics. You gain points when doing something (digging, placing, punching, moving items in your inventory, etc), and lose them by taking damage or dying.
• Tooltips (tt/tt_base) have been added.
• Switch to sfinv-based inventory mods.
• Dye can now be placed on colorable nodes to instantly dye them.
• Sky color changes based on what biome you're in.
• Player's heads now move in the direction they're facing.
• Make sneaking visible from 3rd person.
• Enable the old sneak glitch, allowing for new vertical movement techniques.
• Improve carts riding animation (@appgurueu).
• Gunpowder recipe now uses sulphur instead of gravel, together with coal.
• Sulphur added. A new fuel item crafted from gravel.
• Seedlings now differ based on what flower they grow into and are no longer craftable.
• Compost can now be used on bare soil nodes to randomly spawn grass, fern, flowers, mushrooms, flower seedlings, or mushroom spores.
• Footsteps are now left on more nodes and are left more frequently.
• Non-floodable steel ladders.
• Fire striker now makes sounds and generally feels better to use.
• Granite blocks and granite bricks have been added.
• Crafting recipes for other stone block and brick variants have been adjusted to match the ones of Minetest Game.
• Burn items in lava, and burn flammable items in fire.
• Remove liquid sources from the creative inventory, make buckets infinite in creative instead.
• Allow server operators to restrict TNT usage above a certain height (@acmgit).
• /ver command to check the version you're running in-game.
• Many minor audiovisual changes and readjustments.

Bugfixes & maintenance

• Backport many logging mechanics from Minetest Game for buckets and more.
• Support multiple trunk nodes per leaf node in leafdecay (@j-r).
• Fix multiple TNT-related crashes.
• Fix kelp duping with mesecons' sticky piston (@Zemtzov7).
• Restore dirt under grass or junglegrass turning into dirt_with_grass (@j-r).
• Fix sprint particles and improve code quality.
• Add a wrapper for stairsplus:register_all for mod compatibility.
• Fix hunger being empty after setting enable_damage on.
• Fix no_hunger privelege functionality (@j-r).
• Switch to privelege-based creative checking.
• Don't wear hoes in creative.
• Don't take tinder from user inventory in creative.
• Make water and lava wave.
• Replace deprecated meta:set_string() and get_metadata() calls (@Niklp).
• And more...

Download: ContentDB | Codeberg

[rudzik8]

2024-31 r2

Changes:

Fixed a series of critical crashes when trying to update score with damage OFF.

Download: ContentDB | Codeberg

[rudzik8]

2024-34 r6

Changes:

• Fix footstep removal and add footsteps to dry grass (@j-r).
• Fix container node tooltips.
• Update show_wielded_item to 1.2.1.
• Replace mapping kit texture with one by @Extex.

Download: ContentDB | Codeberg

[Dexterz]

New here, looking forward to collaborate with you all. Thanks

[rudzik8]

New here, looking forward to collaborate with you all. Thanks

Hi! Appreciate it :D

As with any open-source project, there are many ways in which you can contribute to Voxelgarden. They are described in detail in our Contributing Guidelines.

Feel free to ask questions, we've all been new at some point.

[rudzik8]

2024-35 r7

Highlights

• Weather mechanics. Now it can rain or snow, depending on the biome. Both rain and snow extinguish fire, rain can wetten farmlands, and snow accumulates on the ground in layers.
• Bones redo. Bones mechanics got a huge update based on changes from MTG, including (but not limited to) configurable bone sharing and different bone modes (i.e. what to do with player's items on death - "bones"/"drop"/"keep").
• Settings redo. The game settings were updated and sorted out into different categories for easier navigation.

Other changes

• Don't generate falling nodes without support (stone or desert stone).
• Prevent player-placed leaves from decaying (@j-r).
• Lower snow's collisionbox to let players climb up it.
• New binoculars and pine needles textures (originally by @Mirtilo).
• New player skin (based on one by @Mirtilo).
• Desaturate and darken granite textures.
• Import EmptyStar's BiomeDB.
• Improve MTG group compatibility with dye mod (@j-r).
• Expand vg_init's toolset: add a function to call pointed node's on_rightclick (voxelgarden.call_on_rightclick).
• Add tab to vessels shelf GUI.
• Fix grass and dry grass spread ABMs (@j-r).
• Fix river water dummy nodes. Now they are aliased to regular water.
• Fix a few code deprecation warnings.
• Fix typo in README.md (@silvasch).

Download: ContentDB | Codeberg

[rudzik8]

2024-35 r8

Changes:

• Fix rare get_node_light-related crash.
• Move mob-related craftitems to vg_mobitems.

Download: ContentDB | Codeberg

[rudzik8]

2024-36 r9

Changes:

• Fix weather-related ABMs not working at night.
• Fix another score-related crash.
• Logging redo: make all mods use shared formatting through Logging API (originally by @Emojigit).
• Simplify Butterfly and Firefly code (@Emojigit).

Download: ContentDB | Codeberg

[rudzik8]

2024-37 r10

Changes:

• Fix & clear all Luacheck warnings
• Add LICENSE.md (a copy of LGPLv2.1)
• Minor maintenance changes

Download: ContentDB | Codeberg

[rudzik8]

2024-43 r11

Highlights

• Accessible GUI. Higher contrast, lower transparency. Use /toggle_gui to switch between regular and accessible modes. Which one is the default for all players can be switched in the settings (regular mode is set by default).
• Lighting redo. Intensity, strength, radius and other settings for lighting effects (like dynamic shadows and bloom) can now be set in the settings. The new implementation is also much more future-proof, as we prepare for major engine changes.

Other changes

• Update mod translation files.
• Fix issue and PR templates for the Codeberg repo.

Download: ContentDB | Codeberg

[rudzik8]

2024-44 r12

Changes:

• Replace bonfire with campfire. You can cook an item on a campfire by right-clicking it and waiting a bit. When it finishes, the cooked item will appear on top and the campfire will extinguish itself. The recipe requires sticks and leaves.
• Update the documentation.
  • Reflect engine rename (Minetest → Luanti).
  • Rewrite the Getting Started section in README.
  • Improve wording and grammar.
• Replace the screenshot with a new, more vibrant one.
• Make 5.9 the new minimum version.
  • Fix most 5.9+ deprecation warnings.

Download: ContentDB | Codeberg

[wheat8]

Guess what? It's time to experiment again.

Just saw the screenshot of this sky, and it's beautiful !

[rudzik8]

2024-44 r13

Changes:

• Fix campfire's infotext being empty when cooking the last item in a stack (@j-r).
• Fix campfire taking items from players in creative mode.
• Hide unlit campfire nodes from the creative inventory.

Download: ContentDB | Codeberg

[rudzik8]

Guess what? It's time to experiment again.

Just saw the screenshot of this sky, and it's beautiful !

I ended up switching up that mod for a different implementation, by wsor45, for multiple reasons. But the colored skies themselves stayed, as you can see in-game! :D

[rudzik8]

2024-51 r14

Changes:

• Update fences and walls from upstream MTG.
  1. Pull upstream MTG changes for the walls mod, with some prettifying.
  2. Properly introduce the vg.enable_fence_tall setting.
     • was mentioned in the code already from the previous upstream pull for default as enable_fence_tall, but never actually included in settingtypes.txt or minetest.conf.example
     • unlike MTG, it's true by default because of the stepheight VG has
     • prevents stepping over instead of jumping over (see previous point)
  3. Nerf the walls crafting recipe a bit (24 pieces → 12).
• Make the beds movement check more lax for better mod support (@tenplus1).
• Fix bloom-related setting types.

Download: ContentDB | Codeberg

[rudzik8]

2024-52 r15

Changes:

• Make supporting sandstone generate under sand in deserts.
• Get rid of BiomeDB, massively reducing the game's size.
• Convert locale files from *.tr to *.po(t).
  NOTE: This breaks translations with Luanti versions before 5.10. This is done in preparation to open Weblate translations.
• Minor maintenance changes.

Download: ContentDB | Codeberg

[rudzik8]

2025-06 r16

Changes:

• Fix TNT explosions not removing metadata (@LMD, @sfan5).
• Allow digging stray bed top nodes (@Krock).

Download: ContentDB | Codeberg

[rudzik8]

2025-07 r17

Changes:

• Introduce voxelgarden.get_include_helper and a new queue library (currently unused).
• Fix metadata being erased when placing down items.
• Prevent grass from overriding trees at mapgen.

Download: ContentDB | Codeberg

[Wuzzy]

As you can probably guess, I gave this game a try recently.
I think this is one of the better MTG forks.
This is what MTG could have become if it were better.

The game is not perfect, but it kept me playing for a while. It’s a nice time-waster. The game overall still feels a little bit "incomplete" because the are open ends in the crafting system and there's only a limited number of mobs. Only 1 animal, the rest are rare monsters. But I like how the game has progressed in the past.

Some thoughts after a long play session:

* Good use of textures, work well together with the sky color. This alone is a big improvement over MTG
* Collecting sticks is PAIN. Basically you have to manually mine the leaves which is very annoying
* For some reason, the mese pickaxe is worse than the steel pickaxe??? Yes, it digs faster, but it also breaks VERY fast that using the mese crystals for it feels like a complete waste. Is this intentional?
* The mese hoe, on the other hand, is surprisingly OP. But also fun.
* I haven't opened a portal yet, but I found three identical Book of Portal. Interesting way to introduce realms and good to include a method in the game to discover this feature rather than having to look on some obscure help page.
* The dungeon loot is so disappointing, yet it is violently protected by dungeon master. All this fighting to protect 24 sand??? XD
* The only structures are the dungones but I read you plan to add custom structures. Looking forward to it!
* OMG, the dungeon masters are EVIL. Basically if you see (or hear) one, RUN. Fighting them is hard but not impossible, but it's not really worth it. Unfortunately, the explosions are so big, they destroy the entire dungeon in no time, including the chest loot. But still, I like the challenge / danger of dungeon masters.
* Mobs unfortunately only drop garbage items which is unsatisfying (even if this is intentional, apparently). Even the dungeon master only drops 1 mese crystal fragment (1/9th of a mese crystal). This is what MC does better, because the mobs not just drop better items, but also often unique ones.
* The modular doors system is cool, reminds me of rpgtest. But I think the system needs more door module designs to unlock its true potential.
* It's always nice when a game adds new block shapes on top of the traditional slab and stair. It's a simple change that allows many new possibilities
* What is strange is how rotation works. We have the screwdriver, which is support to rotate everything, yet some rotated blocks still have to be awkwardly obtained by crafting.
* Placable items! I like that; allows you to free your inventory without losing items completely. But the graphics leave something to be desired. The fully-flat design is not pretty, unfortunately. A more 3D look would be better but I know how time-consuming this is :-/
* Oddly, I've found a desert right next to a snow biome once
* I think the uses of metal ingots could use some rebalancing because steel is OP (many crafts) while iron, gold and diamond are mostly useless
* Composting is fun, it gives a reason to collect the plants but also is a way to get rid of unused plants. It's interesting that compost allows you to get foreign grasses like savanna grass
* Alloy furnace is a nice unique addition, but it feels a bit too specialized atm, since it can only create 2 ingots atm. Are more alloys planned?
* Weeds on your farmland is very hard to distinguish from young wheat. Idea: Use the # shape (or something other) for wheat so that it looks more different. Or use a different texture maybe?

What a dungeon looks like after an epic fight against a dungeon master:

dungeon.jpg (123.51 KiB) Viewed 854 times

The backyard of my simple homebase (one of my goals is to collect every mineral block in the game):

Voxelgarden_first_house.jpg (156.15 KiB) Viewed 854 times

A functional Molten Rock generator. Place water on one side, then leave a space of exactly 4 blocks, and then place lava on the other side. Build a frame around is to the liquids don't splill. Stand in the middle and keep mining the molten rock that now keeps in front of you. This generator has 2 water and lava sources on each side for higher efficiency, and I think it may be a bit extended.

molten_rock_generator.jpg (35.13 KiB) Viewed 846 times

[rudzik8]

As you can probably guess, I gave this game a try recently.
I think this is one of the better MTG forks.
This is what MTG could have become if it were better.

Yes, I have to admit I was pretty overwhelmed by the flood of bug reports and feature suggestions. Imagine: I switched to my Codeberg tab to find (to then cherry-pick) a commit off of the Mineclonia repo, only to find out this.
I also have to admit that I've got no reason to complain; I've got work to do. XD

Thanks for the complement -- that's how I think of Voxelgarden too. I like to make a parallel universe analogy because the game really did develop parallel to MTG since 2013.
Some of the ideas that were implemented by Casimir and me do come from the MTG issue tracker before feature freeze.

The game is not perfect, but it kept me playing for a while. It’s a nice time-waster. The game overall still feels a little bit "incomplete" because the are open ends in the crafting system and there's only a limited number of mobs. Only 1 animal, the rest are rare monsters. But I like how the game has progressed in the past.

Mobs are up for a complete overhaul with a fork of the mobs API you (re-)wrote for Repixture. You had to solve the same problems with migrating from an old Mobs Redo fork to a new system, and I figured it would be better not to reinvent the wheel and improve on it to make it tailored towards Voxelgarden. It's not much of a wider scope, but it's a different scope: compare a game where 5 out of 6 mobs are monsters (with some, like DM, being really big too) to a game that is described as mostly peaceful. And covering both could give us a new general-purpose mobs API that doesn't suck.

* Collecting sticks is PAIN. Basically you have to manually mine the leaves which is very annoying

Not sure as to how this could be solved. Of course it's grindy but it's one of the first differences players have to learn about when entering early game. Not sure if it's too much of a problem as to focus on it right now either.

* For some reason, the mese pickaxe is worse than the steel pickaxe??? Yes, it digs faster, but it also breaks VERY fast that using the mese crystals for it feels like a complete waste. Is this intentional?
* The mese hoe, on the other hand, is surprisingly OP. But also fun.

I guess Casimir wanted Voxelgarden to be different in that regard by not having the mese pickaxe be OP like it was in 0.3. But forgot about the other?

Either way, I don't think mese should be OP at all. An OP set of tools could be provided as a toy / creative tool, but not obtainable without a creative inventory or give privilege.

* I haven't opened a portal yet, but I found three identical Book of Portal. Interesting way to introduce realms and good to include a method in the game to discover this feature rather than having to look on some obscure help page.

It would be wrong for me to take credit, that's something that was inherited from the original Nether mod, alongside the terrible codebase. Oh well.
All I really did was include them as loot in lava dungeons.

* The dungeon loot is so disappointing, yet it is violently protected by dungeon master. All this fighting to protect 24 sand??? XD
* The only structures are the dungones but I read you plan to add custom structures. Looking forward to it!

Noted. With the new structures will come a rebalance for the old ones.

* OMG, the dungeon masters are EVIL. Basically if you see (or hear) one, RUN. Fighting them is hard but not impossible, but it's not really worth it. Unfortunately, the explosions are so big, they destroy the entire dungeon in no time, including the chest loot. But still, I like the challenge / danger of dungeon masters.
* Mobs unfortunately only drop garbage items which is unsatisfying (even if this is intentional, apparently). Even the dungeon master only drops 1 mese crystal fragment (1/9th of a mese crystal). This is what MC does better, because the mobs not just drop better items, but also often unique ones.

Noted for the mob overhaul.

* The modular doors system is cool, reminds me of rpgtest. But I think the system needs more door module designs to unlock its true potential.

Depending on my interpretation of your suggestion, I'm either going to overcomplicate things into an absolute lagging madness, or..?

* It's always nice when a game adds new block shapes on top of the traditional slab and stair. It's a simple change that allows many new possibilities
* What is strange is how rotation works. We have the screwdriver, which is support to rotate everything, yet some rotated blocks still have to be awkwardly obtained by crafting.

Unlike book of portals, that's something I don't want to take credit not because it's good, but because it's awful. A complete rewrite of the subnode system is on my backlog too.

* Placable items! I like that; allows you to free your inventory without losing items completely. But the graphics leave something to be desired. The fully-flat design is not pretty, unfortunately. A more 3D look would be better but I know how time-consuming this is :-/

That could be done with entities, but that increases server load. Which is already pretty bad due to the amount of ABMs constantly running. I'm afraid I'll have to make cultivatable plants use node timers first.

* Oddly, I've found a desert right next to a snow biome once

Weird. I'll examine the Voronoi graph later but that's obviously not supposed to happen. I haven't encountered it on my memory either.

* I think the uses of metal ingots could use some rebalancing because steel is OP (many crafts) while iron, gold and diamond are mostly useless

I have a few ideas, including implementing some of the ones you and j-r expressed.

* Composting is fun, it gives a reason to collect the plants but also is a way to get rid of unused plants. It's interesting that compost allows you to get foreign grasses like savanna grass

That was actually done to make Unter Null more playable! Like skyblock, but on water, and it's just a chest. j-r suggested that I make compost more useful, and I did.

* Alloy furnace is a nice unique addition, but it feels a bit too specialized atm, since it can only create 2 ingots atm. Are more alloys planned?

I really want to add a system of electric-like power with mechanics and such. Not redstone, and not mesecons. More like Better Than Wolves' mechanical power. Not going for realism but for something tinkery and adherent to the overall Voxelgarden atmosphere.
Considering the metal inbalance, not sure if I'm going to trash this one, but I thought of adding pyrite for it as a new alloy (iron ingot + sulphur), even though it's not an alloy IRL.

* Weeds on your farmland is very hard to distinguish from young wheat. Idea: Use the # shape (or something other) for wheat so that it looks more different. Or use a different texture maybe?

Nice idea. The only real reason wheat is X-shaped is because that's how MTG had it back then because #-shaped plants weren't supported by the engine. MC-ey, sure, but I think it's for the better. Though I might think of something else.

Thank you so much for trying Voxelgarden out post-takeover and sharing so much feedback. I really appreciate it. Not just because it's a good thing for the project, but also because I admire your work a lot.

[Wuzzy]

I think I found the reason for the desert-snow biome problem. After importing the biomes into LiBPoV, I found a boundary between the biomes snowy_grassland and sandstone_desert.

A different problem: I also noticed that at some Y levels, the biomes deep_rainforest and sea_sand overlap at the same biome coordinates.

[goats]

Hi. i'd not checked on Voxelgarden since the last few engine updates, but i've played it on and off for ages. i was just the other day surprised to learn that you've been developing it a bit more - thanks!

My time is short right now, but one thing i'd like to note is that despite a note in /nether/nodes.lua about not wanting to affect overworld lavacooling, lava produces basalt rather than obsidian. Unfortunately i do not understand enough to see why this is happening. i even (probably stupidly) tried adding a height check to to the lavacooling as it is out of scope of the water evaporation height check, if i understand correctly, to no effect.