[Game] Minefall

[Astrobe]

December 2023: "Dig Into Yourself" release.

An unintended update happened yesterday. If you see in the crafting guide that you can craft gold lumps from glowstone, you have up-to-date version.

Highlights:

• World-breaking changes. Your existing worlds will be broken by this release, you'll have to start a new one. I know, I know, I threw away a couple of worlds with hundreds of hours in them. But compatibility would have held back improvement. Because one of the major changes is
• New biome map. More simple, more consistent. Notably, the cold "basalt" biome has morphed into the
• New Basalt layer at -100 meters. Below it is the
• Abyss layer at -300 meters. It is accessible by digging further down or more efficiently, "cave hopping" as I like to call it. Nether portals are therefore gone.
• Improved help. I tried to remove the big wall of text and to place as much info in tooltips as possible. Also, the first player entering a new world gets help messages periodically to help him/her getting started. These messages assume they did follow the hint of using 12341234 as the seed for the world.
• New "gift" feature: a specific feature granted by the game base on the character's name, and not revealed to the players. Possible gifts are: "fisher" (more fishnet durability), "ranger" (more mese wand durability) or "lift" (better upwards lift with levitation).
• Reworked focus and talents. Notably, the less interesting "air" focus now is the only way to remove melding and get aberrant tree saplings.
• Various new effects.
• Uses MT 5.8's mod-controlled fog for weather.

Dynamic shadows support, which was introduced in the previous version, is still here but not recommended.MT 5.8 has annoying shadow flickering on my rig. Moreover, after disabling them, I found out that they introduce a lot of visual "noise", perhaps because of the peculiar tree foliage MF uses.

[Astrobe]

New release: "Show No Mercy".

For more info, see the ContendDB thread

I had to leave out the rationale behind certain changes, though, due to CDB's 2000 characters comment limit. Feel free to ask.

What's next:

• I would like to support cooperation between players, without breaking the economy of the game.
• Particle effects for missiles.
• Have the world evolve by itself even more.
• Provide more things to do underground.

[Astrobe]

New release: "Looking At Nothing".

This release adds particle effects for missiles, includes most of the Default Remastered texture pack, adds a HUD warning when the player is being targeted by a mob (crosshair turns red), adds erosion in the form of unsupported stone blocks having a tiny chance to fall.

For more info, see the [url=https://content.minetest.net/threads/3510/]ContentDB update thread[url]

What's next:

• Multiplayer improvements will be on hold until there's a demand for it (so, what's not next, actually)
• Let players create glowing biomes in caverns and make it worth the effort (hopefully the recently released XNether mod will provide the things I need)
• This release uses automatic_face_movement to improve the behavior of hostile mobs and NPCs, but the old, heavily edited MobsRedo code I use sometimes fights with it because it is based on yaw+velocity scheme; moving to a pure velocity vector scheme will hopefully eliminate those glitches and be more efficient.

[Astrobe]

New release: "Fear Of The Dark"

This release introduces giant glowing mushrooms, toilets, a new wand, a useful Focus Wand function for the early game, and a gold lamp.

Farming has been simplified: no more right-click of the shovel, just mix seeds and dirt to obtain blocks from which the crop will grow. Like previously, the block will turn back to normal dirt when harvested. The shovel is technically not needed anymore for farming, but you'd rather use it unless you're quite patient or poor.

Mushrooms now always turn to dirt the log they grow on when spreading, and therefore become inactive. This is effectively a nerf as mushroom spread is no more exponential but linear.

The drops from lootboxes have been adjusted to better match what players need in the early game.

Abyss ruins now feature a specific bookshelf as loot, just like basalt layer ruins have their own bookshelf. Abyss dungeon's unique block (which changed a couple of times already...) now mimic any "wall-like" block (stone brick and block, including limestone, desert stone, obsidian, basalt and abyssite variants).

The erosion mechanism, which makes unsupported "heavy" blocks eventually fall down has been extended to cobble-like blocks, in particular those usually used to make roofs (slate and terracotta cobble). It also applies to wall-like blocks (which could, if you're unlucky, block a critical path) , but not to player-made aggregate and adobe blocks. Erosion is also now inhibited by protection.

What's next

I want a piece of armor that can act as a Void Chest. At some point players acquire expensive stuff, and an "insurance" is to put occasionally useful stuff in a Void Chest that you carry with you - but the chest itself will likely be lost if something unexpected happens. Armor pieces don't drop on death.

We are almost there with mobs' navigation. The latest changes however introduced minor glitches, to be fixed.

I want to switch the Net to a normal click item, not a right click, simply to see it actually move when one tries to catch something, all while preventing click spamming like currently.

Perhaps add yet another spider to caves, for the sake of diversity. Also, deserts are a bit too lonely; I'd like some sort of sandworm there.

[Astrobe]

New release: Rime of the Ancient Mariner
(this is a reference to the Iron Maiden song inspired from the poem of the same name)

• Adds MTG's boat, but mana-powered
• Adds Void chestplate armor piece (wearable armor)
• Adds a rock crab mob: appears in underground caverns, explodes on death.
• Penalty for dying has been reduced from 5/10 to 1 RP, starting RP have been reduced from 30 to 20. This makes the game more forgiving for beginners (and easier of other players to invite new players in the game, on servers). The cost of /recall command has been reduced to 1 RP for consistency.
• Buffs swords: shorter cooldown. Swords were almost as slow as the hammer.
• Greater armor pieces are now craftable and repairable, but wear out fast. This change comes from a discussion about durability in the game Minefall is inspired from.
• Gliders are now speed limited to 10 m/s, with a shaking effect when on overspeed. Players can use mana to extend the flight time.
• Levitation cost with flyer talent has been nerfed from 1 mana/s to 2. This talent was already useful in a lot of situations; the introduction of boats and the glider change made it even more useful, hence this nerf.
• The "uplift" effect of levitation is now a gift. This uplift is a small upward force that let players to break falls; a "gift" is a hidden, random trait assigned to characters. The uplift was making the game a bit too safe.
• The fish/butterfly net is now operated with a left click, and finally animated.
• Grey Mese instead of orange to teleport to secondary waypoint, orange crystal (instead of green) to pick dungeon beacons, red mese cystal to reset them. With the Greater armor change, players need less red Mese so it was given another use to increase its value; grey Mese is now dedicated to (tele)transport; orange lost its second use to grey, so it was reassigned to travel network building.
• New tree lives model (taken from the optimized version of bushy leaves).
• Weather effects: various shapes replaced by a simple 1-pixel texture.
• volumetric lighting integrated in weather effects (stronger in wet conditions).
• Various recipe adjustments to take into account the estimated value of the ingredients.
• New paper lamp.
• Removed obsolete blocks and items.

What's next:
Introduce a particle effect multiplier as a game setting. Currently particle quantities are tuned for my machine, which is getting old; other users probably can afford more.
Godrays were tuned with 5.9, 5.10 offers more control over the effect, so maybe additional tuning.
Mob glitches are mostly solved, one glitch happening when 2 close mobs chase a player remains to be solved.
I'm not entirely satisfied with the glider's physics and the way the mana boost works, so maybe more tweaking.
Change references to "Minetest" to "Luanti".
More furniture.

[LMD]

Introduce a particle effect multiplier as a game setting. Currently particle quantities are tuned for my machine, which is getting old; other users probably can afford more.

Note that particles recently (5.9.0+) got an order-of-magnitude performance improvement for basically everyone so you should be able to afford many more particles (ideally try it and see though).

[Astrobe]

New release: "A Light Unseen".

This release reworks weather effects. It integrates with 5.10's new feature that let mods control the bloom effect, which I used to try to give a sense of the current humidity, as the bloom effect tends to blurry things. As usual, I tried to keep it barely noticeable rather than "in your face". This affects volumetric lighting ("godrays") as well: e.g. one rarely/barely see it in deserts, and more often in swamps.
A new game parameter (actually, the very first I introduced myself) allows players to increase the number of rain/snow particles. Please note that for servers, it will affect all clients. When tuning it, keep in mind that the game varies the density of the rain depending on if it is a light shower or a thunderstorm. Side note: rain effects are problematic because it is difficult to figure out if a player is indoor or outdoor. The base number is deliberately low because the intent is to suggest rain with particles and other effects (sound, bloom). a x10 multiplier shouldn't affect FPS on relatively old machines; x100 should be doable on newer ones (thanks to 5.10 improvements), but it starts to look a bit ugly at some point.
I have reverted the previous change with regard to raindrop texture (single pixel), because they don't look good when one increases the number of particles.

The accuracy of missiles/projectiles has been increased by turning on the "physical" entity property, which lets us get the collision data provide by the engine, which is also more efficient than probing around for nodes and entities. A side effect is that missiles may collide sometimes.

Aberrant trees no longer spawn fancy things like rock trees with ores; they are now restricted to trees made of wood, with one exception for something which is sort-of a rock but is created by living things. The problem with those fancy trees is that they provide large quantities of uncommon blocks, which in multiplayer could crash markets (for instance). In singleplayer, those trees also present a risk that makes one think twice before growing one.

Most rock cobble blocks get the "columnar" property, which originally was intended to protect trees. In Minefall, these blocks are uncommon and easy to dig, so in multiplayer you'd rather protect them. The columnar property makes it cheaper to protect e.g. a whole because protecting the top nodes only is good enough. In solo play, this only affects the way players dig dungeon ruins for those blocks.

What's next:

The missile change introduced new minor glitches in mobs' behavior, so improving the mobs' behavior is still on the table.

I'm still looking for new furniture to add.

It seems to me that midnight is very dark now, which doesn't fit with our very big moon. Maybe use two sine curves for the light curve, but it's difficult to get it right.

[Astrobe]

New release: "Invisible kid"

The major change is the introduction of invisibility potions and glass bottles, which provide both a "trader sink" (when more traders spawn than you can "feed") and a new, purely decorative furniture.
The new irrigation core is a protected water source for farming. It is both a utility block and a decorative furniture.

The new beetle constantly jumps when it attacks - that alone is sufficient to make it a bit harder to deal with. It has a little less HP to compensate.

The Ice wand didn't function too well as an AoE or "cover" wand and it was making lava cooling too easy. Now it is a proper AoE weapon. It is far less convenient as an "ice source", so this creates trading opportunities.

Lootboxes now drop compasses by 2 instead of 33, which was way too much. This drastic change is meant to favor surface (or underwater) exploration, and to make it an item worth trading.

See CDB's release notes for a summary of changes.

What's next:

This release introduces a game parameter to set the saturation, but it is mostly useless for multiplayer. What's needed is a per-player setting (most likely it will be a chat command).

I'd like to have "leveled" flowing nodes. In MF the flowing range is 1, so I'd like for flowing nodes to be half-nodes, but there's the problem of free-falling water, which must be full nodes. I need to experiment with that.

I'd like to introduce a new mob to increase diversity, but no new drop to assign to it yet.

Since I don't see much to add to offline play at the moment, I will focus again on multiplayer.

Notably drop sharing. I want to find a way for players to receive their fair share of the drops when they contribute to a fight, but without altering the economy of the game (e.g. by just duplicating drops). Luanti's new feature (set item visibility per-player) could help with that.

[Astrobe]

New release: Administrative Decisions.

See ContenDB or in-game /news for a summary of the changes.

I wanted players to build port towns, so I made it so that they can no longer craft and place them anywhere. That's indeed restrictive and a bit forceful, hence the codename of this release.
I was on the fence with regard to the boat's despawn time. I chose 5 minutes, but was thinking about 1 hour. This changes significantly the gameplay, as the 1 hour option lets player more easily "pillage" new locations. Perhaps next release will make it configurable, but the cooldown on waterwheels (from which you can get the boats) should stay equal to the despawn time.
There's a handy new command, /t to start a count-down timer so that players can keep track of their boats, furnace, or IRL tasks.

These "new boats" had a number of cascading effects: the windmills (for gliders) have been "aligned" to waterwheels: cooldown and grey mese as fee. In turn, there was an increased need for grey mese, which was dropped only by crabs that live in oceans. I made it so that yellow wasps, which were mildly interesting as hunting targets, drop it instead of seeds and honey. The beehives had then become the only source of honey, and needed to be buffed a little.

This release also introduces a couple of game options, in particular one to disable the "columnar" property which makes less sense in singleplayer. That's another reason why this release is "administrative".

Lastly, I figured out a way to make it so that players can see rain from indoor. Basically the formula is to make raindrops fall very fast from 20 meter above the player in a sufficiently large radius. The drops are particles with collision detection, so it doesn't rain inside a normal building. There might be glitches in unusual situations, like standing under a big rock arch.

What's next:

I am thinking about introducing new mobs for caves that have been mined out, that drop ores (probably). The intend is to make it worth it to equip caves with light, stairs, etc., eventually resulting in underground cities. This move was initiated with the introduction of giant glowing mushrooms.

I have an idea for a new talent, something about crashing on the ground and dealing damage to nearby enemies.

I am thinking about making it so that digging a dungeon beacon would teleport the player to a random location. There are a couple of mods on that theme. I think it could be a good "adventure", and better than just grinding some mese to pay for the beacon. Risk rather than cost.

I plan bring back a daily game that was present in very early releases; basically the top mob killer of the (in game) day gets a reward, and its score is reset to zero while their opponent keep theirs, so everyone can win eventually. I figured out a way to make it work in singleplayer by introducing a "ghost" (like in racing games) so that the player doesn't win everyday.

I am thinking about changing damage cancellation, more specifically switching from a chance-based stat to a cooldown. I am also thinking about letting players buy stat improvements once they've reached the top level. Currently for instance the game automatically grant 0.1 extra mana for 100 RP, this could be a player buy instead. The new damage cancellation stat could be another one.

[Blockhead]

Tried this today:

• (My fault): first time I played, was too easy because my dungeon noise was cranked up high, also I got a crafting table first or second crate.
• Second time I played: Didn't spawn in green biome, so I quit back to my first seed
• Back to first seed: didn't get a crafting table until I had 15 compasses and 10/20 charges left
• Died to a wasp, lost my stuff. Is my health bar even present? Do the blueberries heal me?
• Okay, so I could try to go get my stuff, but there's another green wasp near my spawn and I don't know the exact direction to set out. I'll try anyway.
• Drowned myself, only indication of low health is a different health loss sound. Okay but if not my levitation mana or health, WHAT are my black hearts?
• Rock crab that attacked me in water followed me on land?

Ok, so I did get my bones back. I really don't want to slam the game, but: the crafting guide is not expansive, there's some armour, few building blocks. Visibility is really odd, it's played mostly by feel, then there are unlocks for more information like the compass. Who knows when I might find a village?

It's possible for a noob to softlock themselves out if they suck hard enough at the game. I really feel like a crafting table should be guaranteed in the first <however many> crates, and available somehow even at 0 RP, or some way to earn back in - at least in singleplayer. I get that it might be a bit of a high-concept avant-garde idea for multiplayer and it might just reduce griefing if you can get over the hurdles.

I might come back to this one later.

[Astrobe]

First, thanks for the feedback. I don't get feedback often, so I don't know people perceive it. And I can't have an objective perception on how difficult or odd it is because I've been playing it for nearly 10 years now.

Back to first seed: didn't get a crafting table until I had 15 compasses and 10/20 charges left

Yes, the drops are random so this can happen. I tried to tune the drop-table weights so that players get what they need (2 cratfing tables, 6 bronze ingots) in about 10 boxes, but nothing guaranteed. Sometimes you only have to open 5 boxes, sometimes 15. But is really only delays the progression a bit, because players should not die more than a couple of times in the beginning.

I don't like the idea of "loading the dice" (to answer your suggestion further down your post) because I find it more exciting to add this kind of variability.

Drowned myself, only indication of low health is a different health loss sound. Okay but if not my levitation mana or health, WHAT are my black hearts?

The health bar is the solid bar on the left of the mana bar, it's not the the traditional "hearts" bar.

Rock crab that attacked me in water followed me on land?

Yes, crabs are usually amphibious... The only peculiar thing about them is that the shoot a missile that teleport them where the projectile lands (if it's not you it hits).

Ok, so I did get my bones back.

This is strange. You should have kept your inventory on death until you level up (i.e. select a "focus").

I really don't want to slam the game, but: the crafting guide is not expansive, there's some armor, few building blocks.

Yes, this is on purpose. I am adding very slowly stuff to make sure everything is valuable (even flowers have 2 or 3 purposes). Next release will probably remove as much stuff/recipes as it adds. I am sort of (somewhat weirdly, I reckon) proud of this 2-4 pages (depending on the zoom level) crafting book, actually.

You missed however specific items like the windmill, the watermill, an "irrigation core", various colors of Mese...

Visibility is really odd, it's played mostly by feel, then there are unlocks for more information like the compass.

I don't understand this remark. Compass are mainly used to detect ores, and also give other piece of information like time of day and current altitude, but they don't "unlock" anything.

Who knows when I might find a village?

Never. All you will find is ruins.

It's possible for a noob to softlock themselves out if they suck hard enough at the game.

Yes. Players can really lose in this game. It's up to losers to consider this game is trash and uninstall it, or start over and try to do better (or hope for better luck); I have no problem with that.

It is very important to read the piece of advice which is given every 1-2 minutes at the start of the game. Minefall may look like MTG, but it is very different from it in terms of game mechanics and gameplay - and that's not just about this funny levitation&lava thingy.

There's also a "HELP" tab which states first the main differences from MTG (and derivatives), and then details the game mechanics.

[Blockhead]

The health bar is the solid bar on the left of the mana bar, it's not the the traditional "hearts" bar.
...

Visibility is really odd, it's played mostly by feel, then there are unlocks for more information like the compass.

I don't understand this remark. Compass are mainly used to detect ores, and also give other piece of information like time of day and current altitude, but they don't "unlock" anything.

So the health, mana and breath bars are not visible, as far as I can see. I don't have any nonstandard window size, just a standard 1080 windowed mode. I think you will want to check the ContentDB release against 5.15.1 for bugs, because I get 5 of these on launch, hence my remark about "black hearts" being all I saw.

Code: Select all

2026-04-08 09:51:58: WARNING[Server]: Deprecated usage of statbar without size! (at /home/blockhead/.minetest/games_default/minefall/mods/hudbars/init.lua:214)

This is strange. You should have kept your inventory on death until you level up (i.e. select a "focus").

🤷

You missed however specific items like the windmill, the watermill, an "irrigation core", various colors of Mese...

You're right, a too-brief browsing or summary undersells what's there. I did see the mese shard colours while I was there too.

Who knows when I might find a village?

Never. All you will find is ruins.

Ok, so it was revealed to me with another hint that the traders are wanderers, not in villages like I guessed from the help. I actually do appreciate that the game is its own game and that you build knowledge of it over time.

[jara25]

Blockhead, make sure your minetest.conf does not have settings that are overriding the game's minetest.conf, because this game works properly for me. The user's settings are prioritized over a game's settings, and it's an annoying gotcha that can cause a game to behave differently than intended. I know that Glitch, for example, shows a warning if the physics settings were changed by the user. It also does not help that games and mods can write to minetest.conf with core.settings:set().

One setting that may be in your minetest.conf is the bones_mode setting, which dictates what happens when you die. You should probably just comment that out for now since it is interfering with Minefall's death mechanics. The HUD bars warnings are benign, and that is noted in a comment in the HUD Bars mod.

I thought I saw an issue about this in Luanti's GitHub repo, but I guess not...

(...and yes I had to deal with this too.)

[Blockhead]

One setting that may be in your minetest.conf is the bones_mode setting, which dictates what happens when you die.

Thank you, I did have this set, to the same as MTG's default. I reset it to unset with the in-game settings menu. I even got a new death message about returning home unconscious. This is a bit annoying - if only one death mechanic is intended, it seems odd that Minefall lets it be changed around, or at least without a warning like the one you described.

I thought I saw an issue about this in Luanti's GitHub repo, but I guess not...

This is more an issue with other games all sharing one setting because of the same name inherited from bones mod from MTG than an engine issue.

[Astrobe]

Blockhead, make sure your minetest.conf does not have settings that are overriding the game's minetest.conf, because this game works properly for me. The user's settings are prioritized over a game's settings, and it's an annoying gotcha that can cause a game to behave differently than intended. I know that Glitch, for example, shows a warning if the physics settings were changed by the user. It also does not help that games and mods can write to minetest.conf with core.settings:set().

One setting that may be in your minetest.conf is the bones_mode setting, which dictates what happens when you die. You should probably just comment that out for now since it is interfering with Minefall's death mechanics. The HUD bars warnings are benign, and that is noted in a comment in the HUD Bars mod.

I thought I saw an issue about this in Luanti's GitHub repo, but I guess not...

(...and yes I had to deal with this too.)

Thanks for the tip !

The game comes with a minetest.conf with the correct settings but I guess I misunderstood something about the "hierarchy" of settings in Luanti.

The Hudbars mod also loads a bunch of settings as well, which could explain the hudbar issue that I can't reproduce (and indeed, that "deprecation" warning has been there for years because apparently there's no good solution to a bug related to that feature...)

Anyway, for now I have nuked any sensitive setting readings by mods and replaced with the expected value.

[Blockhead]

The Hudbars mod also loads a bunch of settings as well, which could explain the hudbar issue that I can't reproduce (and indeed, that "deprecation" warning has been there for years because apparently there's no good solution to a bug related to that feature...)

Anyway, for now I have nuked any sensitive setting readings by mods and replaced with the expected value.

Yep, once again my minetest.conf coming pre-loaded with settings is the culprit.

Code: Select all

hudbars_alignment_pattern = zigzag
hudbars_bar_type = statbar_modern

Removing those fixed the statbars in Minefall.

[Astrobe]

So I really wonder what did go wrong here:

• Luanti giving "too much freedom" to players and games (e.g. letting games overwrite settings) ?
• The authors of mods not separating properly the "backend" (lib/API for games to configure and/or use the features they propose) and the "frontend" (settings, recipes so that players can use the mod out-of-the-box) ?
• The author of the game (me) not RTFM'ing properly ?

It seems to me that these troubles come from the "mod-MTG-to-create-your-own-game" era, which was over the moment Luanti rebranded itself as a game engine.

[Blockhead]

I would apportion blame as follows:

• The engine for letting settings so easily overlap between games. The settings apart from mapgen are usually global, even though per-world and per-game settings are probably preferable in many cases.
• Mod authors for potentially not considering all of the contexts their mod could be used in - not a major amount of blame here though.
• Game authors for not thinking about all of the settings attached to their off-the-shelf mods and how they might already be customised.

The fix here seems to be either to provide a way for the hudbars to work with my settings, like if some textures for mana bubbles (& other stats) can be added instead of relying on it being a coloured stat bar, or if you override that setting out of existence with a fork or override mod for hudbars.