Coolest Luanti facts?

[GreatBigDiamond]

I have recently thought of a video idea: "Top 5 Luanti facts you didn't know" and I need some cool facts about Luanti, so can you please post your favorite fact or an opinion about Luanti??

Thanks!

(extra) Also, why is the word "Luanti" show a spellcheck error on the luanti forum?

[ErrorNull]

here's some facts to get started. some might be cool. should be mostly accurate. correct me if wrong. :)

1. Luanti was formerly known as Minetest and rebranded in October 2024.


2. The new name "Luanti" blends "Lua" (the scripting language used) and "luonti" (Finnish for "creation").


3. Luanti is an open-source voxel game engine focused on creativity and modding.


4. It supports massive procedurally generated worlds up to 62,000 × 62,000 × 62,000 blocks in size.


5. Players can build or mine up to 31,000 blocks in any direction.


6. The engine uses Lua for scripting, enabling deep modding and custom game development.


7. The official ContentDB has over 1,100 open-source mods and games.


8. Notable games built on Luanti include VoxeLibre (formerly MineClone 2), NodeCore, and Backrooms Test.


9. Luanti runs on multiple platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, and Android.


10. It is lightweight and runs well on older or low-spec hardware.


11. Luanti is used in education to teach programming, math, and earth sciences.


12. It's been used in French schools to teach calculus and trigonometry.


13. In Brazil, a variant called MineScratch helps students learn programming.


14. The engine is actively developed and maintained by a strong, community-driven team.


15. Luanti is licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later, encouraging open collaboration.

[Blockhead]

1. The Sam character for Minetest Game deliberately has a gender neutral name and appearance. The team never saw a need to introduce a second character like Minecraft's Alex (although clone games of Minecraft do have male and female type skins, and Alex is not explicitly female).

2. You can connect the latest version of a Luanti client to any Luanti or Minetest server from 5.0.0, released March 2019, all the way up to the current version of 5.11, and soon to be 5.12, and it is backwards-compatible. (there are sometimes minor problems like with transparency on some blocks past 5.7 changing, but nothing ever stops the game loading and the warnings and errors are always easy to find and fix from the game's logs).

3. Not only is the client backwards-compatible (and the server forwards-compatible) from that far back, but all of the mods on the server are automatically useable on the client, because all the code lives on the server.

4. There are no restrictions on what you can do with Luanti itself (however there are restriction in parts of the community like the ContentDB, serverlist, forums-matrix-discord-irc etc.). You can have guns, drugs and content only suitable for mature audiences. In fact, one of the most popular servers/games is CTF, which is a shooter game.

5. Luanti has a Game Jam every 11 months where developers, new and old, compete to make innovative new games around a theme. Everybody enjoys the results, and it adds more to the variety of games that Luanti wants to support, not just Minecraft clones (games where the main loop is resource gathering and building on top of natural terrain and a few structures).

6. The most popular operating systems for Luanti are Windows, followed by Linux, then by Android. macOS users are a small minority and somehow there are still iOS users even with no official port to iOS (they might be on something like Multicraft). The most popular web browser of Luanti users is Firefox. (source)

[cx384]

6. The most popular operating systems for Luanti are Windows, followed by Linux, then by Android. macOS users are a small minority and somehow there are still iOS users even with no official port to iOS (they might be on something like Multicraft). The most popular web browser of Luanti users is Firefox. (source)

Doesn't it say the opposite, or did I read it wrong?
1. Linux, 2. Android, 3. Windows, 4. macOS, 5. Unknown, 6. BSD

[Blockhead]

Doesn't it say the opposite, or did I read it wrong?
1. Linux, 2. Android, 3. Windows, 4. macOS, 5. Unknown, 6. BSD

I was reading the chart in the first post that refers to all traffic. You're reading the chart in the first reply/second post that refers to traffic inside of the client. I suppose that's a more accurate measurement of installations, and that Windows has a larger number of window shoppers?

[TenPlus1]

Minetest was first released in November 2010, a whole year before the initial release of Minecraft, and both were based on a game called Infiniminer that came out in April 2009.

[PiTTi]

... in November 2010, a whole year before the initial release of Minecraft...

hm, I had my first Minecraft Server Version beta 1.6.5 in July 2011, and have been playing since September 2010 (MC alpha 1.1.1)

[Hybrid Dog]

Nyan Cat mapgen

Luanti once had a Nyan Cat in minetest_game. It was generated underground in stone nodes and so rare that it was one of the the most precious nodes in the game. Despite its preciousness, it could be used as fuel in a furnace. The way in which the mapgen has put the Nyan Cat nodes into the world was and is still mysterious to me. The algorithm simply puts the nodes with minetest.set_node() into the world but for some reason, these nodes did not appear in the map in most of the generated mapchunks but only in a few of them. Intuitively I'd think that there's a race condition where the nodes placed with minetest.set_node() are sometimes overridden by stone nodes and sometimes not. However, race conditions usually aren't deterministic and nonetheless the Nyan Cats appeared at the same positions when a new map is generated with the same seed. The effect of this behaviour is that if a player finds a Nyan Cat in a map chunk, he/she has a high chance to find more Nyan Cats in the same map chunk, and a cheater has no success in determining Nyan Cat positions if he/she generates a map with the same seed as some server and a modified code which prints the positions where minetest.set_node() is executed.
I think this distribution of Nyan Cats is a rarely-known fact which humans cannot even find out by reading the code.

Optical illusion and not a bug

There exists issue #10018, where an optical illusion has tricked the developers to think that the game has a bug and it took some time until they've noticed that it's an illusion. The illusion has even tricked sfan5, who is a developer at the mpv media player project, where similar graphics topics such as colour correctness are common.

[Blockhead]

Minetest was first released in November 2010, a whole year before the initial release of Minecraft, and both were based on a game called Infiniminer that came out in April 2009.

This one gets repeated a lot, but Minecraft was well in development in 2009 as well, not very long after Infiniminer at all. By December 2010, it had already reached the beta stage, which is what the "before the initial [sic] release" must be interpreted to mean to actually be correct. celeron55 has always clearly stated that his work was a clone of Minecraft - Wikinews - to "figure out what can be done with it that Mojang won't do". Many of us know this, but a bald statement about "before Minecraft" sounds like a claim to originality to someone who doesn't know the history.

Fact: Mese is an in-joke that refers to MSN Messenger in Finnish internet slang. Editorial: I wish we still had the wiki pages around for reasons like having a reference to this, I had to go to the Wikipedia page for MSN, but I'd probably have to check the wayback machine to see if it was actually cited on the Minetest wiki. Instead there is now the competitor project's wiki in my search results...

[Linuxdirk]

Luanti (back then Minetest) had a feature called farmesh, simulating far away nodes in a very simple mesh to simulate generated world parts that would be otherwise out of viewing range. But the feature was hacky and broken and got removed when the rendering code was updated.

Attached is the only screenshot of this feature that I was able to find.

[freshreplicant]

Fact: Mese is an in-joke that refers to MSN Messenger in Finnish internet slang. Editorial: I wish we still had the wiki pages around for reasons like having a reference to this, I had to go to the Wikipedia page for MSN, but I'd probably have to check the wayback machine to see if it was actually cited on the Minetest wiki. Instead there is now the competitor project's wiki in my search results...

Whoa...I had no idea. Mind blown. I always wondered where the heck it came from.

[Melkor]

Luanti (back then Minetest) had a feature called farmesh, simulating far away nodes in a very simple mesh to simulate generated world parts that would be otherwise out of viewing range. But the feature was hacky and broken and got removed when the rendering code was updated.

Attached is the only screenshot of this feature that I was able to find.

Ohhhhh don't remind me

[GreatBigDiamond]

THANKS!

[GreatBigDiamond]

Also, here is the final video: https://youtu.be/nC6s5oBTWuo

[Melkor]

THANKS!

this guy is a bot

[Blockhead]

THANKS!

this guy is a bot

It's 2025 and bots and people who rely too heavily on AI are indistinguishable. Certainly the video was not very well done, mostly verbatim...

[GreatBigDiamond]

THANKS!

this guy is a bot

i am human

[Melkor]

That's what an IA would say, prove it >:(

Honestly, now I'm just kidding, I don't really care that much.