Help with setting up a server

[matth]

Hi

I'm completely new to Luanti and was trying to setup a small "home" server that my son could use to play together with some of his friends. However, I have troubles to get this up and running despite having read through the guides provided and searched for solutions.

Here is what I have done so far.

- For ease of keeping things separate, I prefer to run this in a docker container. While the official images don't seem to support Raspberry Pis, I managed to build an image locally.
- I created the following directories:

Code: Select all

minetest/
minetest/data
minetest/conf

In minetest I created a docker-compose.yml with the following content:

Code: Select all

services:
  minetest_server:
    image: luanti-org/luanti:master
    restart: unless-stopped
    container_name: luanti
    environment:
      - TZ=Asia/Hong_Kong
    volumes:
      - /home/matth/docker/minetest/data:/var/lib/minetest/
      - /home/matth/docker/minetest/conf:/etc/minetest/
    ports:
      - "30000:30000/udp"
      - "30001:30001/tcp"

- I downloaded the https://content.luanti.org/packages/Lua ... test_game/ and unzipped the file to minetest/data/.minetest/games/
- I set the ownership of the whole directory structure to user/group 30000:30000
- I then run docker compose up -d and the container actually starts

However, I then get the following errors in the log:

Code: Select all

2025-12-03 12:28:23: [Main]: Automatically selecting world at [/var/lib/minetest/.minetest/worlds/world]
2025-12-03 12:28:23: ERROR[Main]: Mapgen: Mapgen alias 'mapgen_stone' is invalid!
2025-12-03 12:28:23: ERROR[Main]: Mapgen: Mapgen alias 'mapgen_water_source' is invalid!
2025-12-03 12:28:23: WARNING[Main]: Mapgen: Mapgen alias 'mapgen_river_water_source' is invalid!
 _                   _   _ 
| |_   _  __ _ _ __ | |_(_)
| | | | |/ _` | '_ \| __| |
| | |_| | (_| | | | | |_| |
|_|\__,_|\__,_|_| |_|\__|_|  ___ 5.15.0-dev-e90c724cf-dirty

And when I log on to the game, I am just in an empty blue world.

What am I missing or doing wrong? Any help highly appreciated.

[cx384]

Looks like the game didn't load correctly. You have to start Luanti with --gameid minetest_game and set the environment variable MINETEST_GAME_PATH to your minetest/data path (the folder which contains games, not the game folder itself.)
See Luanti man page.

If your world is still blank (test if the game is loaded with /mods in game), it may be the case that the singlenode mapgen is selected. You can change this in worlds/<worldname>/map_meta.txt by editing e.g. mg_name = v7.

To set which game is loaded you can also set gameid = minetest_game in world.mt in your world folder

[matth]

Thank you very much. It seems the last hint to set the gameid in `world.mt` did the trick.

Now I just have to figure out how to actually play the game.