Minetest Forums

In my opinion, Minetest seems too easy. I'm able to get diamond tools withing five minutes if I wanted to. Is this a result of a mod? Or v7 map generation?

Or luck.

In my server it took the players about 2 weeks of exploring before they even found 1 diamond ore. (Which is extrene, because in previous servers it was much quicker).

wziard wrote:Or luck.

In my server it took the players about 2 weeks of exploring before they even found 1 diamond ore. (Which is extrene, because in previous servers it was much quicker).

Caves exist for a reason

Yes it's too easy. But I develop a hardcpre server with valleys generator, which generates ores very deep and i write special mods. Health does not regenerate by eating and being sat, you need to use drugs (bandage, aid kit and pills). You need to eat 2-3 times a day to be sat and etc. Some mods will be published.

First, it's called “Minetest Game”.

But yes, it's very easy. Ironically, the “mining” aspect of Minetest Game is shallow. It really is Minetest Game being so easy, it is neither the fault of a mod or the v7 mapgen. It's Minetest Game's fault. By the way, diamond ore is not the final ore. Mese blocks will appear much deeper and are much rarer, but you can just craft them from mese crystals anyway. And after you reached “mese block layer”, there will be nothing new. The underground gets repetitive fast. I think the reason why mining is so easy is that the better ores are just deeper, but not neccessarily any more difficult as the “danger level” stays the same all the way. In this sandbox you can only die due to your own stupidity.

I consider Minetest Game to be mostly a creative sandbox. It's not a challenge or anything. You basically just go around and build stuff. xD Yeah, that's really all there is to Minetest Game. If you expect anything more from it, expect to be very disappointed. Minetest Game is a very shallow excuse for a game, and it's not a very good one. It should really be called “Minetest Sandbox”, as it's a sandbox, not a game. I think the word “Game” is very misleading here. xD
In v5.0.0, there will be a couple of more blocks and stuff to build with, but no new mechanics will be added.

There are lots of mods for Minetest Game, but it will take a long time to find the “right” ones. You could also try out some of the other games that this community made. I like Lord of the Test.

Wuzzy wrote:I consider Minetest Game to be mostly a creative sandbox.

Minetest Game is nothing more than a base for modding since it provides some relevant APIs.

Wuzzy wrote:In v5.0.0, there will be a couple of more blocks and stuff to build with, but no new mechanics will be added.

But it still is a sandbox without real dangers and it still lacks being a game by not even fulfilling the most basic part of being a game: having a goal to achieve due to playing it.

Fortunately there are some mods that make it more fun but unmodded Minetest Game feels like the early Minecraft alpha versions but without mobs.

Linuxdirk wrote: it still lacks being a game by not even fulfilling the most basic part of being a game: having a goal to achieve due to playing it.

I disagree rather strongly with this statement. (I know LinuxDirk won't mind, he said himself he prefers the 'direct' style of communication :-) )

Something doesn't need to have a goal to be a game. Children playing with dolls don't have a goal. They're still playing a game. A sandbox game is still a game.

I agree that it would be nice to have an *additional* game with a goal. More games is better :-). But don't dismiss the endless amount of fun that can be had with the current MTG, just building and exploring.

actually, minetest game has a goal :P
dig up the entire underground and use the resources to fill up the empty sky world.
once all the ores have been mined and all tools are consumed, you can only use wood and stone tools.
more stones can only be generated by mixing lava with water, unless you already turned all lava sources into obsidian.
obsidian can only be mined with steel or higher tools, but when there are no more ores, you are unable to continue. the game is finished.
that's the ultimate goal that no player could achieve yet.

wziard wrote:Something doesn't need to have a goal to be a game.

Depends on definition of "game". A sandbox or child's play does not quality as game to me. I stick with the definition of game designers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman which concludes the general idea of what a game is very well ("A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.").

wziard wrote:But don't dismiss the endless amount of fun that can be had with the current MTG, just building and exploring.

Absolutely. While Minetest Game itself is very barren it is a good base for modding resulting in hour and hours of amusement and joy.

Linuxdirk wrote:

wziard wrote:Something doesn't need to have a goal to be a game.

Depends on definition of "game". A sandbox or child's play does not quality as game to me.

"No true Scotsman", huh? ;-)

The difference between a pure sandbox game and a "directed" game is in who sets the goals. In sandbox games, it is the players who define the goal ; for instance, make a big and nice house. In directed games, the designer sets the goals usually together with a whole story to support it.

I think of MTG as a neutral, demo game. We cannot add hostile mobs and say "fight for your life or die trying" or "grind for hours to get what you want" because it will drive away a lot of newcomers, I think. So it has to be a sandbox game with minor goals like growing stuff, building stuff and crafting stuff. Once the player is bored with that, they can take a look at the "network games" tab or at CDB.

Astrobe wrote: "No true Scotsman", huh? ;-)

He didn't make that sort of argument at all, he gave a specific definition of what a game is, one which is well-known and which excludes that sort of play. That's very different from "yeah that's not a real game tho."
A No True Scotsman is a kind of special pleading normally used to exclude any counterexamples that would damage one's argument. It's a very different tack from what he's doing.

I guess when I found Minetest, I was expecting a Minecraft clone. But It's different. And I like it. I'll try modifying it to my liking.

Minetest Game 5.0.0-dev has ores moved deeper in non-mgv6 mapgens, they're roughly twice as deep now. We could have made them much deeper but the change can't be extreme as so much depends on MTG being the way it is.
Also, in survival mode, you need to craft certain items to use the minimap or zoom (mapping kit and binoculars).
So yes we're intentionally making it a little more challenging.

MTG is limited by it's history and by what depends on it being the way it is. It's important to not focus on it too much or expect excellent gameplay from it. What is really needed is new games.

If you want more mining depth, try my underch mod. Maybe there should be some mobs. I think, there could be also a way to get quickly down to the point (or near the point) where you ended.

Easy?
Yes it is easy.
Easy to get disconnected from the server due to bad connection, log back in and discover you died and EASILY lost EVERYTHING BEING CARRIED because there are NO BONES !!! Died on ladder or something. IDK but I gave up on MT. Sick of that crap. I die in World of Warcraft more often than I want to think about and I've NEVER lost what I'm carrying. True, not free but well worth the price for not wasting hours of my game time

ok bye

L22 wrote:In my opinion, Minetest seems too easy. I'm able to get diamond tools withing five minutes if I wanted to. Is this a result of a mod? Or v7 map generation?

Depends on the gamer, freshly or never had to work (mine, craft) for something,
but therefore I have more-ores what is really hard, but much advantage armor,
but your free to stop gaming minetest or set your server mapgen other settings for diamond.

paramat wrote:What is really needed is new games.

That's a chicken and egg problem. As long as Minetest doesn't come with multiple games, there is little incentive to make one. And as long as there are no good games*, Minetest won't include them.

* Actually, there are good games.

There are a lot of games already. A proper advertisement is what lack.

A lack of games can, and should, be an incentive to make new games. There's no excuse and no-one to blame except yourselves =)

paramat wrote:Minetest Game 5.0.0-dev has ores moved deeper in non-mgv6 mapgens, they're roughly twice as deep now. We could have made them much deeper but the change can't be extreme as so much depends on MTG being the way it is.
Also, in survival mode, you need to craft certain items to use the minimap or zoom (mapping kit and binoculars).
So yes we're intentionally making it a little more challenging.

It does not make MTG more challenging, it makes it more grind-y. Going deeper is not the right direction if you want to show off the beautiful landscapes and biomes that MT can generate.

If you want to make it more challenging without mobs, dispatch ores to different biomes. In particular move Mese and/or diamonds above 120 (alt of the cloud layer by default, IIRC). Finding mountains that high is difficult but it makes players explore the world. Then climbing up and down mountains is a challenge too, especially when clouds hide what's below.

MTG is limited by it's history and by what depends on it being the way it is. It's important to not focus on it too much or expect excellent gameplay from it. What is really needed is new games.

F2P games make sure that the first hour or so of the game is really engaging so that new players don't quit and never return. Certainly the MT project doesn't have dirty business motivations, but one should be aware that MTG plays a similar role for MT. New players can be very quick to throw away a game, especially when it's free and doesn't take hours to download. If MTG makes MT look like crapware, new players won't even try servers or to download community-made games.

One should be very cynical and consider that new players are more important than old game makers, who won't quit MT that easily if you break their stuff a little. AFAIK nobody made promises anyway.

I'm puzzled by the fact that in the standard distro we have a "minimal" game (which is not minimal and is useless to the newbies) but not the tutorial.

Astrobe wrote:I'm puzzled by the fact that in the standard distro we have a "minimal" game (which is not minimal and is useless to the newbies) but not the tutorial.

It was officially decided to keep minimal in the final release for development reasons.

https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/4006

This makes no sense? Yes, that is correct.

Linuxdirk wrote:

Astrobe wrote:I'm puzzled by the fact that in the standard distro we have a "minimal" game (which is not minimal and is useless to the newbies) but not the tutorial.

It was officially decided to keep minimal in the final release for development reasons.

https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/4006

This makes no sense? Yes, that is correct.

Nope, multiple developers want to remove it from releases

The issue you link was closed and replaced by this one: https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/6987

rubenwardy wrote:Nope, multiple developers want to remove it from releases

The issue you link was closed and replaced by this one: https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/6987

Too bad the new issue is dead since a year and nothing was changed.

Thanks for reminding us about it, it'll be removed from the Windows build and I'll write a patch to remove it from .deb and such by default