Minetest
Minetest is a free and open-source sandbox video game and game creation system with focus on voxel graphics. It is written primarily in C++ and makes use of the Irrlicht Engine. Minetest provides an API for users to write their own games and mods written in Lua. It is cross-platform, being available for Linux-based systems, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, MacOS, and Android. In the default game of Minetest, Minetest Game (MTG for short), players explore a blocky, procedurally-generated 3D world spanning approximately 31 000 full nodes (blocks) in each direction, and may discover and extract raw materials, craft tools and items, and build structures and landscapes. Depending on the game selected and mods present, players can fight computer-controlled "mobs", as well as cooperate with or compete against other players in the same world. The game mechanics of Minetest are similar to those of the 2009 game Minecraft. Over a decade of active development Minetest has garnered critical acclaim and gained in popularity; since November 2013 Minetest has been downloaded over 1.4 million times from GitHub, and the Android version of Minetest has over 500,000 downloads on the Google Play store. Gameplay Minetest is a voxel sandbox video game. Gameplay is in the first-person perspective by default, but players have the option for third-person perspective. The game world is composed of voxels: 3D objects, many of them simple cubes, commonly called "nodes". Different voxels represent various materials, such as dirt, stone, ores, tree trunks, water, and lava. The core gameplay revolves around picking up and placing these objects, one node at a time. Nodes are arranged in a 3D grid, while players can move smoothly around the world. Players can "mine" (or "dig") blocks and then "place" (or "build") them elsewhere, enabling them to modify the game world. Players can also craft a wide variety of hand-held tools to aid them with the world modification. Pick axes allow to dig rocky nodes, shovels speed up the digging of dirt and sand, water buckets allow to pick up water nodes, etc. A player controls a 3D character known as Sam, which is a recursive acronym for "Sam ain't Minecraft". As players explore the world, new areas are procedurally generated, using a map seed specified by the player. A new game puts the player in the center of a voxel cube 62 thousand nodes across, so the player can travel 31 thousand nodes in any direction (sideways, up, or down) before reaching the invisible wall at the end of the world. The world is divided into biomes ranging from deserts to jungles to snowfields; the terrain includes plains, mountains, forests, caves, and various lava/water bodies. The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle, and one full cycle lasts 20 real-time minutes. Minetest provides two basic game mode options: Enable Damage and Creative Mode which affect how players interact with the world and use items. Creative Mode is intended to provide players with infinite resources, while toggling the damage setting determines whether the