Introducing Our New Name

Name is awful but game itself looks awesome. Can any speak to how “good” it is, especially server play?

Pretty much everything in Minetest is a 3rd party mod coded in Lua. It is viable, but you are limited by the netcode and the quality / integration of 3rd party mods.

There are a lot of creative mods + abilities. That the Lua programming language is core to the engine, means it is easy to do all sorts of supported creative things with the engine. But some of the mechanics and 'smoothness' of play that you can get in Minecraft just isn't there yet in Minetest, due to how the network protocol works. Give it a shot, you can play a local world with very little effort, and if you know lua, look at some of the 'world' definition code.

The thing that bugs me is how ... intrusive the object dependencies are. Outside of the most trivial mods, you absolutely must buy into one of the major ecosystems, and quite a few things can't be changed in an external mod, only in the ecosystem's core mods, because they're all registered in a single function that's not hookable. Changing the core mods themselves of course causes problems whenever you want to update them.

That said, some of the ecosystems (frameworks?) themselves are decent as-is. The two mineclone forks (I don't pretend to know the difference) are probably the best place to start.

Mapgen sucks if you want any kind of realism though. Even the mods that pretend to care about it (half of which are in lua and thus really slow) don't operate on a "top-down" level, so always end up with things like "water flows uphill in a circle". And the grid is very obvious, especially if you're obsessed with the dimensions of your base like I am. I also suspect poor RNG control in places. And there's definitely an idempotency option - if you quit (or crash) the game while mapgen is still running, you can end up with half-generated terrain.

Even the builtin mapgens are slow to generate new terrain if you use the "fast" cheat.

(this ended up being a bit more negative than I'd like; I don't intend to stop people from trying it)