Friendly, and unsolicited reminder that the Minetest engine + its game Mineclonia (or alternatively Voxelibre) are a pretty good open source alternative as of late.
Minetest is also getting some pretty nice upgrades to its graphics lately. The upcoming release should be looking quite pretty.I see Minetest is available for android. Can you run Mineclonia on a phone?
Indeed you can. Personally I find the phone interface a bit too clunky, but if your phone’s hardware is up for it, it does run, and all platforms that support Minetest are compatible with each other.
+1 for Minetest
I run a server on our local network that kiddos love
It was fairly simple to setup including which game type and mods
Can you use minecraft mods with any of these clones?
If not it’s kind of a deal breaker.
Nope, you can just use these mods for the time being.
On the flip side, it’s orders of magnitude easier to write a Minetest mod, and keep it updated with later versions and compatible with other mods.Highly unlikely. Minecraft has a lot of quirky code, and the mods would have been built around that code.
For all intents and purposes, the clones are a different game entirely, and unless the mod author specifically goes out of their way to make their mod compatible with the clones, or a different version for it, they won’t work.
its game Mineclonia (or alternatively Voxelibre)
I see that Voxelibre has considerably more players, but you list Mineclonia first. Do you have a preference between the two?
Well for the sake of context Mineclonia is a fork of Mineclone2, which has now rebranded itself as VoxeLibre. The project was forked due to personal and design disputes. In fact the most productive developer of Mineclonia, used to be the lead dev of mcl2.
Currently VoxeLibre maintains the continuity of the original project and the community which explains its higher popularity. Mineclonia by comparison has very little presence, the discord server was set up like a couple of months ago I think.
But in terms of code, mineclonia has been the faster evolving of the two. More features, more bug fixes, and advances from voxelibre that are deemed valuable are cherry picked. In terms of specific features, I really prefer the double digging depth, and the better villages. And voxelibre has significantly shortened the attack range which I find really annoying.
Other than that, mineclonia is more commited to being a true clone of minecraft, with voxelibre going out of its way to diverge, especially after the rebrand, which might turn out to be wise if microsoft’s trademark lawyers come knocking.
