MinetestEDU

The page is intended to provide information for teachers, youth and social workers of all kinds who want to use Minetest in an educational sense together with children and young people.

There should be information for the minetest beginner, both for the teacher and the student. What possibilities Minetest offers and where it has limits. How to use Minetest on your own and extend it with mods. Or how to set up a server on the Internet and protect it from unwanted access. Particularly for the work with children, care is taken to ensure that the children can be adequately supervised in order to facilitate orderly cooperation.

Teachers who are willing to translate the texts into other languages can of course do so. It is also possible to create new pages in your own language, which can then be translated by others into their own language. As a basis, however, all information should also be available in English.

Deutsche Startseite - Page en français

General information about Minetest

Minetest is a free open world game for almost all operating systems. In randomly generated worlds consisting of blocks, the player can extract different resources, combine them with each other and shape the world according to his or her liking. Minetest is very similar to other sandbox computer games like Infiniminer and Minecraft. The game doesn't actually have a goal or an end, but the focus is on constructing buildings from blocks. However, it is also possible to construct a world in such a way that certain goals must be achieved, depending on what is desired. Technically, the minetest engine is particularly focused on two goals. The game content should be easily modifiable and extensible by Mods and should also work on older and new machines.

Why Minetest and not Minecraft?

Minecraft is much better known and many children and teenagers are already playing it. So why use Minetest? Here are a few arguments:

Contra:

• Getting a server on the Internet is not as easy as it is for Minecraft. There are only providers for this and you have to administrate your own server by hand, because there are no graphical interfaces allowed, as is the case with Minecraft.

Pro:

• It's free because it's open source and it's going to stay open.
• It runs on almost all operating systems and devices ... except iOS systems.
• From all versions (also from the tablet) you can usually visit the same servers.

Why switching from Minecraft is so easy:

• What you can do in Minecraft is generally the same way you can do it in Minetest (sometimes better or more simple).
• The operation is almost identical to Minecraft, so even changers shouldn't have any problems.
• There are tools to convert Minecraft Worlds into Minetest Worlds.

Possible errors that might occur for Minecraft users

The biggest mistake you can make with Minetest is to consider only the naked system you get with the installation. Because Minetest is (almost) nothing without the extensions (Mods) and mini-games (also subgames). The main developers are very reluctant to stick to fixed features. But extending Minetest is much easier than it is with Minecraft if you're not an absolute computer layman.

On this page we have therefore gathered information to help you learn about important enhancements that make Minetest a fully-fledged replacement for Minecraft. Surely it will take some time before a minetest variant will be released, which will make it easy for teachers with little personal experience to manage larger numbers of students. The fact that there is no company behind Minetest will certainly have an impact. That's how community members develop what they like ... sometimes better than in Minecraft... but here and there there is a lack of details.

However, this collection of information here is intended to enable technically interested teachers to use Minetest by assembling all necessary information. You are welcome to add your own information. Everyone is invited to attend.