Minetest started as a FOSS version of Minecraft and has grown into an entire platform that you can run other games inside. It runs on Windows, Mac, FreeBSD, Linux, Android, and probably more. I’ve only given it a quick play but I’ve seen a few posts praising it for being what Minecraft used to be, so if you miss the good old days then this could be the game for you. There’s already some good discussion about running it on a Steam Deck on this post (which points to this blog post).
Anyone played before and have any recommendations for good games to play?
I’ve tried MineTest a couple times, and as much as I want to love it, its just so slow and clunky and ugly compared to Minecraft. I just redownloaded it, intending to grab screenshots to compare the visuals, but got fed up with the lag spikes, and how long it was taking to build a scene to match Minecraft before I could even finish that. I was getting performance comparable to a mid-weight Minecraft shader-pack just running on default settings.
The thumbnail image is so appealing, so when you said it looks ugly compared to Minecraft I could not help but feel a little betrayed
The textures are very different although those can be swapped out (albiet with very limitted options if you aren’t willing to build the pack yourself). Its more the lighting and shading I don’t like. They tend to look a lot more washed out and flat compared to Minecraft. Turning on the more intensive and/or experemental features helps a lot, but falls far short of whats easily available for Minecraft and makes the already iffy performance noticably worse.
In terms of performance, I was struggling to even maintain 144fps on MineTest with regular drops down to 90. I was finding I was getting about half the framerate on average compared to Vanilla Minecraft, with almost no difference running around loading chunks, and a significant advantage for Minecraft in more static areas. That said, Minecraft is a game with a massive modding scene with access to engine-level changes, and using a bunch of the more popular optimization mods mean I tend to be getting roughly double the framerate compared to vanilla Minecraft and four times that of Minetest.
Im sure stuff can be improved, but the userbase and development backing just isn’t there as it stands.
Minecraft must have changed a lot in the years since I’ve last played it, I never got more than about 20 or 30 fps back in the day. I’ve never even owned a device with a refresh rate higher than 60Hz so your complaints about 144 fps are like grumbling that your Ferrari is too slow!