All Games consistently ignoring their prepackaged 'mobs' mod

[scooterx3]

Hey gang, I've been trying to set up a server for myself and my kids to play on. I love the idea of the 'Games' in that they're a prepackaged set of mods that one can simply select and go with.

A problem I continue to have regardless of the Game I select is that the 'mobs' mod is never 'available'. I always get errors saying that the 'mobs' mod is missing (and of course, no mods show up).

Last night I tested with a Game called 'repixture' and checked in my ~/.minetest/games/repixture/mods directory (I'm on Linux) and yes the 'mobs' mod is there. I noticed that if I copied it from that location to ~/.minetest/mods/mobs then the complaints about the missing 'mobs' mod ceased.

So what it seems to me is that something somewhere is preventing at least the 'mobs' mod from loading. It's consistent across all Games. Because it's consistent across all Games it makes me feel there's a general Minetest config thing that I'm just not understanding.

This is installed system-wide (fedora repository) and isn't a 'run in place' binary or something, as I've seen mentioned a couple of places on the forum.

Does anybody have any suggestions to ensure that every Game I use quits ignoring the included 'mobs' mod (or any other mod for that matter) and instead focuses on another directory? I did try removing ~/.minetest/mods altogether and still no dice. :(

[freshreplicant]

Hi there! When you say 'mobs' mod do you mean this one:

https://content.minetest.net/packages/TenPlus1/mobs/

Or any of the related mods (mobs_animals, mobs_monster)? If so, this mod should not come packaged by default. When you instal Minetest, it usually just has the Minetest game and some built-in default 'mods', but none of those have anything to do with mobs or creatures.

I am not sure if TenPlus1's mobs mod works with any game except for the pre-packaged default 'Minetest' game. This is the one I use and most mods should be compatible for (unless they state otherwise).

From my memory Repixture has it's own mobs, but they should come installed a part of the game and should require no other mod, but I could be remembering wrong.

I would suggest uninstalling Minetest, removing any configs and then starting fresh. Stick with Minetest the Game (which should come with the installer) and customise this with mods. Make sure to keep track of what you have enabled and that you keep an eye out for any mods that are dependencies.

Hope that helps!

[scooterx3]

I did at one point install TenPlus1's 'mobs' as ~/.minetest/mods/mobs/ but that would've been standalone that (I presume) the default 'Minetest' Game would've used. And when I did that I got different errors (specific mob assets were missing even though the mod itself was present).

I'm aware that Repixture (and others) have their own mobs. I didn't try to modify or replace ~/.minetest/games/repixture/mods/mobs at all. The odd part is that when I copied (as a test) ~/.minetest/games/repixture/mods/mobs to ~/.minetest/mods/mobs, the complaints of "missing mod 'mobs'" that otherwise were displayed upon loading the Repixture Game went away. Other oddities remained, but it provided some clues/insight/detail into the problem.

Yeah I think I'll blow away configs, purge every Minetest thing and try again. Something is interfering with just the 'mobs' included in the various Games. Maybe I was playing around with it at some point in the past and didn't realize that I'd goofed something up.

[freshreplicant]

Are you installing mods via Fedora's package manager by any chance? I would highly recommend using the built in Content tab to install mods/texture packs.

[scooterx3]

I am using the built-in content downloader to install the mods.

I did blow it all out (nothing really of any worth on there - so far all my kids have done is build a tall 1x1 tower and fly around) and tried again and at the least Repixture worked. Didn't have to install anything to ~/.minetest/mods (that's the default location for mods on Linux when having installed system-wide). I did observe other Games that were having issues. Not sure yet if that's to do with just their being weird or perhaps after having loaded one Game, something got stuck somewhere in config and prevented other Games from loading properly. Not sure at all yet. I can try on some more fresh installs and see.

But I do think that the Games' own 'mods' directory is the only thing referenced by default, and if I were to need to specify certain mods to load from ~/.minetest/mods then I'd think that would override what the Game intended to use.

That's my thought. Makes more sense for a Game to ignore other mods from the default location (unless perhaps explicitly stated somewhere in config).